The Azure Window, in Gozo Island, Malta, a photo by Luigi R. Viggiano on Flickr.

New year, new life. Got my camera bag stolen with all the gears in my hometown Turin. Yesterday I was looking back to the old pictures, and I found some good ones made with a 10 year old super compact camera, Pentax Optio S. I found this one and I like it. Unfortunately I lost also this camera too, during the misadventure in Turin.

Sunset on Salzburg, a photo by Luigi R. Viggiano on Flickr.

I got very positive comments about this picture I made yesterday evening in Salzburg. My only picture in flickr explore was another sunset I shot in Dusseldorf, and this one is getting good attention today, so I hope it will be my second flickr explore pic.
Some work colleagues suggested a bit of fill light at the base. I actually used some vignette effect to focus the viewer attention on the center; if the composition was a little bit better I could have cropped the base area a little bit more still keeping the sun and the mountains in the right position.
Still, it looks like everybody likes this shot. So here I share it also on my blog.

Venetian Mask, a photo by Luigi R. Viggiano on Flickr.

I made many pictures of those masks in Roman shops. In some shops I saw same sign saying "no picture please". Eventually the idea to shot those colorful masks is not too original, and the shop owners get tired of people coming in just for pictures. BTW those masks are for sure the most colorful subjects I found so far. And here’s another one.
The price for the most funny sign in a souvenir shop goes to the one with "for the sake of our health we don’t provide touristic informations!", wow :-)
In my ‘venetian masks’ set, this one above is definitely my favorite.

This picture has been shot from the Rhein promenade in Düsseldorf. I remember I was having a bad day at home, so I went out for a photo walk, which extended to be till late evening. I come back with a lot of good shots. The sun was red and visible by bare eyes, and the buildings were completely black, projecting only their own shadow. At the time I didn’t know that this was a perfect subject for a ‘Silhouette‘ photography. I’m still a photo beginner.
This is my first picture on Flickr Explore. I increased the red a little bit, but this picture is almost a “straight out of the camera” one.

Looks like with the plugins I installed recently on my blog, the spam is completely gone away.

I didn’t want to install captcha, since they are quite annoying. But it looks like they are effective against spam. I found “Conditional CAPTCHA” which works in the correct way: the user insert the comment, if the bayesian filter identify the comment as spam, then a very simple captcha is displayed, so the user can prove that is a human being or a spam bot. If the captcha test fails, the comment is deleted definitively.
Additionally I am using “Bad Behavior” which checks the ip address against an online black list, and prevents suspicious ones to even connect to your site.

So, this is my list of WordPress plugins that have proven to be effective against spam:

1. Akismet
2. Bad Behavior
3. Conditional Captcha

So far, so good.

I still moderate comments manually, approving/trashing them one by one, since I don’t receive many comments, it is feasible. But if this plugin team works so well, I might stop moderating the comments and let it run completely automatic.

Last week I visited Liège. It was rainy, and we found refuge in the Saint Paul Cathedral. The picture above shows how beautiful this church is. And photographic friendly. I was in Aachen Cathedral the week before and it wasn’t half much as beautiful as the Liège Cathedral, use of tripod is forbidden and interesting area are accessible only for pay. Liège Cathedral was a wonderful surprise that day; protected us from the rain and offered very majestic and suggestive views.
I’d like to visit again Liège, hopefully with a better weather. The city is very beautiful.

Sunday afternoon I made an excursion in the Unterbacher See and I made some nature photos. I found a restaurant where this typewriting machine, an Adler Model 7 of 1900, was lying on a table. So I took a picture and I tried to apply the texture photo retouching technique that I learned recently. The final result is the picture above.

Bookmarks about texture photo retouching:

• How to Apply Textures to Images Using Photoshop
• Matt Nicolosi Photoshop Texture Layering Tutorial

Another noticeable link is Second Picture, Tutorials of Digital Art & Design, this is not just about textures, but all about photography and image processing. Awesome.

Killepitsch liqueur can be tasted in the small bar “Et Kabüffke” near the brewery Uerige. I use to go in this place for a Killepitsch to complete the dinners with friends in the Düsseldorf altstadt (the old city).
I’ve heard that Killepitsch is only available in Düsseldorf; I don’t know if this is true, but I never saw it abroad. For the taste it remembers me the Italian Amaro Lucano, which might be easier to find in shops outside Italy.