Rocco Galatioto, nice photos and good food

This is one of my all time favorite archival shot. It's an old shop on State Hoyt Street in Brooklyn. It was shot on Tri-X with a Nikonos II underwater camera and the Nikkor 35mm F 2.5. I just love it.

This is the classic pizza around here.  It's name is sfincione palermitano and it has a very intense flavor. It's really the ultimate focaccia.

Shot in July of 2001 at the Brooklyn Botanic garden with my first real digital camera, one that I used professionally. It had great image quality but it's body  and features were very rudimentary. I hope these will brighten your winter day.

These local  carrots are almost too good to be true. Their delicate flavor balances their wonderful and strong aroma. I usually do not like carrots but these are really delicious. Naturally I bought them at the local farmers' market. Because this is, after all, a photo blog I must mention that this hand held shot was made with the Panasonic LX-7 with the white balance set at its automatic setting, It's faithfulness is really amazing.

These photos are of a very wonderful person who was a cousin to my father in law and who lived in Washington DC. She was a true character and I consider myself fortunate in having known her. I used the Leica M-4 with the 35mm Summicron and Tri-X. These photos are from the spring of 1970.

It's becoming apparent the the Micro Four Thirds System will surely become the system for serious and even professional photographers.  The newly announced Tamron 14-150 3.5-6.8 III VC is the first lens for this format from this manufacturer.The whole paradigm has shifter towards the smaller cameras as these become increasingly more competent and useful thus making the heavy "impressive" pro cameras less attractive to serious photographers and will be relegated to those who want to show off. The mine is bigger than yours syndrome. This is certainly great news. The 5.8 end of the scale is slow but should not be a problem with EVF's and with the new cameras' abilities to provide good results at high ISO settings.

I Visicari, a very unusual settlement dating to the Arab conquest was  small, have been modernized   a very a Muslim hamlet virtually build into the mountain. The houses that look very small have been modernized while keeping the exteriors in their original conditions. It is now a very fashionable  place in the country.

This new term lifeproof sort of the nomenclature indestructible found on dog toys. All of these so called  toys were easily destroyed when my gorgeous Catahoula Leopard dog Charlie was small. Now we are to believe that there's such a thing as a camera that by exstention is to last forever. Heavy duty would be a more fitting name for these cameras. Nevertheless, they are really handy on a beach or during inclement weather. Pentax Shows Three New "Lifeproof" Cameras The people at Pentax have just released three new rugged WG-series cameras; the affordable Optio WG-10 and the Optio WG-3 - WG-3 GPS . While the latter two are pretty much identical, they  differ  by the fact that one offers GPS functionality (along with a few other relative features). Each new model offers the usual compact camera specs for a 2013 model, with rugged specs that active users find very useful.

When I first arrived in the States, the whole city was magical but Coney Island was even more fascinating. First of all it had the beach and naturally the sea and although it was very different, it sort of reminded me in a sadly nostalgic way my beloved Castellammare del Golfo. We used to go swimming there always cursing the cold water but at least it was the sea; it was comforting. Of course Coney Island had it's other attractions and it was fun. This fascination with Coney Island newer waned and it became one of my favorite places to go with my camera. I especially loved to photograph it off season when the place became rather lugubrious. This shot was taken on a sunny Sunday afternoon in October when the visitors were very few.

A portrait, candid or set up, must capture above all a person's innate dignity. These shits are from a shoot at a rehabilitation center and i tried to capture all the character that years add to one's personality. I hope I succeeded. The person just above was over 100 years of age,

Something I whipped up last night for a light supper. Fresh carrots and celery, great canned Italian tuna fish in olive oil, fresh lemon juice, real olive oil and a few local olives thrown in for good measure, Fantastic.

These two photos taken in Lancaster County Pennsylvania of Amish children date back to the early seventies. They were shot on Kodachrome II with a Leica M-4 and a 50 mm F2 Summicron.

These broccoletti sicilian i as they are called in the mainland are known with a variety of names here in Trinaacria. When I was growing up we hardly saw any in me are and because we called cailiflower broccoli, when we arrived in the States we used to call them broccoli andi boia or Andy Boy Broccoli. to distinguish them from plain broccoli or cauliflower. This sounds like a circular sentence if there's such a grammatical phrase. My  mother still calls them this way. I am about to cook this for a late lunch. Just boiled in slightly sea salted waterr and then served with a little garlic  and olive oil. Che delizia della natura.

Good news from Google for any one involved with images Google Launches a More Streamlined Image Search Google has always looked foe new ways to improve its image search enginee and their latest change makes things faster,a little  easier to manage images for users. It used to be that when you  clicked a picture you wanted to look at, it would open in a new page, but now that preview shows up right in line with the rest of the images you see,  with some basic information about the image. Thanks to the inline format, you can even use your keyboard to browse through images. No mouse, wow. To visit the page that the image is hosted on, you simply need to click the image a second time. You can also click the domain name that's listed next to the picture. Give it a try.

Williamsburg Bridge, Canon 1-D Brooklyn Bridge from he old fish market, Canon 30-D Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges, Nikon D-2X Some of New York's bridges at night all litt up and becoming even more splendid and magnificent.

From the what will they think of next department, comes this device called the McCam - not sold at local McDonalds, BTW - that has all sorts of privacy implications for all of us. I can see the so called law and order forces rushing to get one of these to spy on us. Here's the synopsis from the announcement in DP Review:  We must have one: The MeCam is a voice-controlled flying video camera helicopter that streams directly to your Android phone. Now really is this all it can do? According to Android Community , Always Innovating is working on the product, which will also follow your every move after it's been synced to your smartphone and share its video stream via your social networks.  Three  patented stabilization algorithms keep the device in flight. The MeCam will run on a 1.5 GHz Cortex-A9  processor with  1GB of RAM, micro-SD for storage and WiFi/Bluetooth capabilities. Always Innovating anticipates the MeCam will start at $49. ...

This is not a dish for those who are not too kitchen savvy but it's absolutely delicious. It's a dish made with sardines that have been cleaned of their bones and skins, marinated in vinegar and some sugar as to give their agrodolce or sweet and sour taste, breaded in flour and finally sauteed in olive oil and red onions. The sweet and sour type of cooking came to the Mediterranean region from the far east eons ago and it appears in many of it's cuisines. I must confess that I saw these in the take out food section of the Spaccio Alimentare super market here in Castellammare and bought a nice amount. Delicious. This is a uniquely Sicilian dish, by the way. It must be noted that sardines and other fish known as pesci azzurri or blue fish have all sort of healthful benefits especially on the cardiovascular system,

Someday just a walk in the back yard garden can yield pleasant results. This is especially true  on a cloudy spring day when colors become saturated and when the light is low and one can has to use wider aperture settings to get nice blurry backgrounds. I hope that these will brighten you week and make you dream of spring.

Pictures are everywhere, but do they really mean anything in the end. Sometimes it feels that I have already taken every photo that was ever taken and that this has become just a habit. I never gave myself any airs or called myself an artist, I just spent the greater part of my life taking pictures. If some stand out, so much the better. I am not fishing for compliments. And even if I did, no one is willing to leave a comment. I knoe you are visiting the blog and that keeps me going. So gain, thaks for taking a look.