Rocco Galatioto, nice photos and good food

What it looks like in north east Pennsylvania. Not too pretty. More cold and possibly more of this horrible white stuff is on the way. Enough already.

These are also out of camera JPEGS from my old Fuji S-2 Pro. It had an uncanny ability to reproduce excellent skin tones as long as the exposure was right on.

Shot at Oceania Aquarium on Long Island while on a Job for Keyspan, my client, on fuel cell implementation. The camera was the Fuji S-2 Pro. Out of camera JPEG.

Shot in the spring of 2005 with the Fuji S-2 Pro at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden on a  magical Saturday afternoon.

I have raved about the quality of the wines produced on the North Fork of Long Island. Some snobs may point their pampered noses up and some others will not even lower themselves by even trying them. I can only say too bad for them. In my BC period, that is before children, when I had much more disposable income, I became enamored with wines. I grew up in a wine producing region. On my  maternal grand parent's farm house we actually had more wine than water and my paternal family were all coopers. So you can understand my love of wines. Therefore I began savoring many great wines some even French! Just kidding, and developed a taste for the good stuff. But I must assert that I find many wines from Long Island to be exceptional and I am not ashamed  to shout it. As we say in New York: so sue me .  At any rate these images wee all shot with the Nikon D-70 a nice small DSLR.

This is a theme and variation on the very delicious but rather more complex pasta arriminata , that I have written about and posted  on past occasions . Being sort of "cooked up" in the house because of the never ending snow that I totally detest,  my fantasy wonders to what to cook. So here we have a simple pasta cù brocculi fritti or pasta con con cavolfiori fritti . in Italian. In Sicilian we call cauliflowers broccoli while broccoli are given many appellations depending on the region. It's a very simple recipe. Cook the imported Italian pasta - no substitutions- and the cauliflower florets in water with Sicilian sea salt, drain and place on a skillet in which you have sauteed, in good extra virgin olive oil, a small scallion, a chopped clove of garlic and a sprinkle of peperoncino. Stir  and add some grated cheese, and some  plain bread crumbs, as a concession to my northern Italian compatriots, parmigiano can be used for a milder flavor. Please stay away from ...

New York in the seventies sort of carried on from the wonderful sixties and there was no better place to observe this youthful energy that Central Park on a Sunday afternoon. These shots, originally on color slide film were scanned and converted to black and white to give then a more classic look. The camera was my Leica M-4 with the 35mm Summicron F 2. Close and personal street photogr aphy.

NEWS FROM KOWA My first ever SLR was a KOWA SETR that I bought it in the fall of 1968. I soon traded it for the Canon FT that I used along with my Leicas for years until, in 1973 I got my first Nikon and a true love affair began. But this is a digression. I just learned that Kowa will me marketing a line of  3 manual focus lenses for the Micro Four Thirds system. They should be out this summer.

I have already raved on how nice this camera was and how it's four mega pixels along with it's dedicated lens put out. Here are a few more from the fall of 2001.

My beloved Castellammare del Golfo, the one and only