Rocco Galatioto, nice photos and good food

This is Stonington Borough's Main Street that has now become full of boutiques and expensive places to eat. There are the usual espresso joints that should be avoided as what they pass for espresso is pathetic. As a matter of fact it's difficult to get any good coffee these days; it's all very watery. I remember when this was real place with many luncheonettes that catered  to the local Portuguese fisherman and other local residents when one could get a very nice meal at a reasonable place. Because of the inevitable gentrification, these have all been turned into expensive boutiques. We noted a dearth of people on a normal week day. Perhaps things pick up during the weekend and more into the summer months. Our visit was in middle June. Needless to say the place looked somewhat depressing. It is, nevertheless, a beautiful town worth visiting and we go there at least once a year .

This technique is usually used to create the feeling of motion. Here I had no choice as the light was low and I didn't want to pump up the ISO lest noise artifacts show their ugly faces. This is a folk group from the Egadi Islands off Sicily that graciously performed during our feast of the ventuno d'agosto . The annual big feast in Castellammare.

This beautiful town east of Palermo on Sicily's north coast is worth another visit. famous for it's mosaics it also has superb examples of Norman architecture. These photos are all around the famous church and show the cloister and the general area surrounding the church. The place is a bit touristy and I avoided the usual tourist trappings that go along with such places. .

This series of releases are strictly for techies who have never understood that photography is not about lens aberrations, distortions, noise etc. It's about emotions. I do not care about all the technical jargon as it gets in the way of the image. But to each his own. So now we have this: DxO Labs has just announced the release  of version 2 of its distortion-correction software Viewpoint. Designed to correct for  the inevitable perspective distortions like converging verticals, It can  now also use DxO Optics Modules to correct for  barrel or pincushion distortion. Viewpont can be used as standalone software and  or as a plug-in, that is now compatible with Adobe Photoshop Elements and Apple Aperture (as well as Adobe Photoshop CC and Lightroom 5). A one month free trial version is available to download now, and Viewpoint 2 is on sale.  Give it a try if you must .

Castelllammare del Golfo's madrice or main church lies on the oldest part of the town but it has a very unusual feature: it's partially hidden. The piazza in front of it only covers half of the church, leaving the other half sort of hidden and on a narrow street. it's a very old church and it's where I got confirmed many years ago but I still recall that event clearly,

Unbelievable. Photoshop Elements has hit version 12. This ever increasing in versions program is very useful but it cannot be upgraded. One must buy it new every time. A bummer, but the price is good. So here goes: Adobe has just announced the release of, can you believe it,  version 12 of   Photoshop Elements   for Mac and Windows. One of the new features of this version of this less costly consumer-friendly photo editor is 'Mobile Access',  that uses Adobe's Revel cloud service to let users view and retouch photos on their mobile devices, keeping everything in sync. Other new features include 'Content-Aware Move', guided editors, and 64-bit support for Macs. Best of all, there's no monthly subscription fee.  The fact that it has no subscription fees may make it an ideal replacement for the full version whose advantage over Elements is increasingly becoming marginal.

These buildings are in Sandwich, Mass, that is located in Cape Cod. All were shot with the Panasonic Lumix GX1.

A totally wonderful New England town with that delightfully simple architecture that is so different from the ususl European one. Just lovely.

Paris is a walking city in the sense that one can enjoy walks. This is especially true on Sunday mornings when the city is still asleep. Except for the shot of the Seine from the left bank, the other photos are from the right bank.