digital art en

Gargoyle Party

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You know those nights when the imagination decides to go off-script? That’s how I ended up making a tiny gothic clip where one devil gargoyle and two strange creatures, sneak away from their eternal duties and throw themselves a party on some forgotten cathedral ledge.
All of it looks like straight out of a 19th-century engraving — sharp lines, dark shadows, and a mood somewhere between mischievous and slightly tipsy.
It’s only a few seconds long, but watching a strange stone creature relax with a drink in hand feels oddly… wholesome.


More whimsical clips to come!

2025: A WEBHOSTING ODISSEY

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Part One: The Past

Once upon a time…

I’ve been dealing with websites since short after the dawning of internet, fascinated by that then-new marvelous technology that allowed anyone endowed with a modicum of computer skills to reach everywhere in the world almost instantly – and for peanuts.
At the very beginning merely static webpages painstakingly assembled in naked HTML, my works quickly evolved into more sophisticated websites made with Dreamweaver and Flash, then inexorably into complex dynamic sites and online shops developed in Perl. Eventually, out of convenience, I landed on widespread WordPress, a comfortable web-development platform that I still keep using today in its classic mode without cumbersome blocks.

The first hosts

Yet a website is nothing but a jumble of bits unless it is placed on a server connected to the internet, and a server is provided and maintained by a host, the indispensable interface between a company and the World Wide Web. As you may easily guess, over those years I’ve seen all sorts: I’ve changed so many hosts that I’ve lost count of them. From some I run away scared, disgusted or fuming after less than an hour, by others I stayed for several years.

There are so many memories… the fondest one is about the CEO of a host whose name is now lost in the fogs of time, who kept an ante-litteram blog, “from my desk…” until he sold the company, that soon thereafter became bleakly impersonal.

An ominous experience…

Then there was another host that here I’ll call MaphYeah (not their real name), by which I lived the most sinister and at the same time most amusing experience of my web-designer career.
One day I found within my WordPress website hosted by MaphYeah the parasitic clandestine site of a Chinese company selling fake branded clothing – for which I would have been legally accountable. At my outraged complaint (I was paying an extra specifically for “security”) they demanded an additional hefty sum to cleanse my share of the server, implying subtly that, should I leave, the issue would follow me.

…but a nice discovery

Of course I flew the coop at once by cloning my website onto a different host and (better safe than sorry) added there as many anti-malware WP plugins as I could find on the web.
One and only one of them identified immediately a backdoor (who might have put it in there?) that I removed easily. Like this I found out what plugins boasted protection without providing any, and which one really worked – a most important discovery that took me a lot of toil and anger.

Since then my partner and I customarily add the “good” anti-malware plugin to the websites we design, as part of a new comprehensive security package of ours (inclusive of regular backups and much more) we offer to our customers.

Most web developers agree to take care also of SEO and diffusion, but nearly all of them neglect the ‘security’ part, which is growing increasingly essential as the web-ruthlessness expands uncontrolled.
No mere words: we thwarted successfully a considerable number of attacks to our customers’ sites (as well as to our own ones) and thus we know all too well what it means to swim among sharks and pirañas.

And what about that infamous host? For all I know “MaphYeah” is still alive and kicking, so beware! Before opening an account by an unknown host ask all relevant questions. If they ignore or evade them, run away as fast as you can.

Part Two: The Present

Almost satisfactory but… 🙁

Until a few weeks ago my host was A2Hosting, once considered to be among the best ones. For several years it really was, and I was quite happy with them: WordPress-optimized servers, satisfactory speed, friendly fast competent efficient customer service.
Nothing is perfect though, and even at their best they had two significant flaws:

– While the contract boasted infinite server memory (quite an ambitious goal, actually), in fact as I exceeded a 50 GB threshold they started bombarding me with emails saying that they were insured up to 50 GB and beyond that there was no backup, thus I’d better reduce the memory use. Not so nice indeed, they should have made it clear at the outset.
– After the first promotional year their annual fee grew really huge. But after all my image-intensive webpages loaded very fast and their service was reliable, not necessarily a given in my experience. So I stayed with them.

A2Hosting beheaded to Hosting

But alas, all good things come to an end: not long ago ‘A2Hosting’ became just ‘Hosting’, the company grew larger and the real troubles promptly began.
I had by them quite a number of interlinked websites, all with excellent internet visibility, and I could count on a considerable constant visitor flow.
Until one day a few weeks ago I noticed that on one of my sites all the pages showed up regularly – but without the images! Sort of annoying when it affects a site designed to sell images, right?
I opened a ticket – no reply, not even the usual boring automatic one. Pretty fishy.
Long story short, after one day they got in touch with me and soon the issue was solved. But as I asked for a technical explanation of what really happened, who tampered with my websites without my permission and why, they turned cagey talking vaguely about an unspecified “setting” and promised it won’t happen again. Not a hint of an apology.

Other people, other mood, other way to treat a customer. Downsizing? Greediness? Too many customers? I don’t know and I don’t care, As a (dearly) paying customer and a professional I expect clear explanations, not fogbanks. And many sad experiences suggested that once such an attitude creeps in, it stays.
Fortunately my annual contract with them would expire in a few weeks, about the time needed to find a better host and safely migrate 6 websites. A stroke of luck indeed: I canceled my contract and started looking for a more decent host.

Not an easy job indeed: they all use to promise the moon and stars, but very few of them deliver. However sometimes a long suffered experience comes in handy, at least by allowing me to read between the lines rather than only on them.

A new hope

So I eventually decided on BoostedHost: plenty of positive feedback, same quality as A2Hosting when they still worked OK, competitive cost even after the first year for the same performances.
And from the outset I’ve been pleasantly surprised by their kindness and availability, their competent advice, their prompt help in optimizing my sites’ cache by them to my full satisfaction.
All in all a great sigh of relief!
Another – if more subjective – positive point is the feeling that the team here is enthusiastic about their job and happy to provide help and solve the possible problems – something you don’t find around every corner.

All in all BoostedHost seem to have all the assets needed to grow into a really big hosting company, thus most likely they will. Will they also be able to retain their enthusiasm, their friendliness and their competence along and after the growth? I really hope so, and wish them so: that would finally put an end to my way too long and troubled odyssey in search of a most decent host 🙂

Part Three: The Future

While talking with other artists and photographers I get the feeling that most of them would be tempted to try and set up a website of their own but hesitate due to the lack of specific know-how.

Will AI provide the solution?

A few days ago I got an email from BoostedHost telling me that by them is now available for free (the magic words!) an AI-based system called ‘Orbit’ that should greatly help in the design of a website. So far I had no time to try it but I’m curious as hell: apparently all you have to do is to explain in plain words what you wish, choose pictures, themes and styles, and… voilà,
a perfectly optimized website without any hassle.
Generally speaking the popular “if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is” is a very wise guideline, but a number of amazing sessions with ChatGPT and a long successful cooperation with MidJourney convinced me that there are exceptions. So why not give it a go?

With a bit of luck I’ll find the time and report to you about it in detail next time 🙂

If you liked this post I suggest to read How to sell stock images today too.

Venetian Graffiti n.2

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My photo of another interesting graffiti on a Venice street wall
‘La patria sarà quando tutti saremo stranieri‘
literally:
‘There’ll be a homeland only when we’re all foreigners.‘

A paradox that overturns the traditional idea of homeland: not an identity that excludes, but a condition that includes.
Only when no one is “at home” can we all feel at home.
Is it utopia, or simply a definition still ahead of its time?

Gameover POD Galley – Ice Dance Sketches

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new!

I made this set of (almost) black and white sketches using one of my personal styles developed on Midjourney.
I like them. It is not only about dancers but also about frozen movements in a moment of grace and black-and-white contrast: they speak of passion, raw energy, precision and elegance. And why not, freedom.

Pity I have not a single space left on my walls 😀

An own Print-On-Demand website?

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Voilà, here it is!


How did I come to face such a feat?
First of all, for fun: I love making websites, that’s it. I had just completed a serious, demanding, challenging website – a historical archive – and needed to do something relaxing to rinse my brain… OK, that’s the truth, but not the whole truth: there was also a bit of commercial interest behind my resolution.

All began when I started visiting the usual popular Print-On-Demand sites…

… disguised as a buyer, in order to find out why I was selling so little on them – well, I actually did sell something there, but not enough to deserve any serious time or toil. I focused on the most obvious form of POD: the art that one hangs on the wall.

I was appalled by the prices:

would I buy anything that expensive myself? Definitely not! Unless perhaps in case of love at first sight, but that seldom happens.
Greed may certainly play a role in setting those high prices, but there must be something more to it. Let’s give it a thought:

First question:
why should one buy a framed work of art somewhere halfway around the world and pay the outrageous shipping costs, when the bare printout would travel much cheaper and faster in a cardboard tube?

Then all it would take is a walk to the do-it-yourself shop around the corner to have it framed according to one’s taste, in a self-chosen frame, maybe also with a sheet of real glass (rather than those horrible acrylic substitutes that would survive the shipping). Which would save about 3/4 of the total cost.

But that’s not all.

Second question(s):

who prints the work of art you choose, and on what paper, and what kind of printer do they use?
Most of the times the colors you see on your monitor don’t look very much like those you see printed on paper.

Who checks the color rendition?

And the diffusion effect?

And the overall quality of the finished work?

Then a disturbing thought came in without knocking:

of course the POD website gets the lion’s share, but also the printers must have their slice of the pie, and the packagers, and the shipment company… what’s left for the author is but laughable pocket change 🙁

Which encouraged briefly the sneaky temptation to bypass at least the POD sites and go directly to those sites that offer printing&shipment as a service… but alas, nothing doing: unguaranteed printing quality, long or very long processing times (up to 2 weeks!)… better forget it.

All of the above looks pretty disheartening, but I’m stubborn: my glorious printer can handle up to A3+ paper sheets (13” x 19”), quite a respectable size for a picture on the wall. A high-quality printing on it takes a mere couple of minutes of my time. I’m free to choose the best possible paper with the right grammage, texture and consistency. I have an encouraging constant number of visitors who show up in my websites, thus there’s no need for advertising…
So why not?
If it works, fine. And if it doesn’t, at least I learnt something new and had my fun 🙂

As a matter of fact I already had a lot of fun thinking of what would fit best on a wall and devising the proper mockup images to convey the mood to my visitors – here too MidJourney, adequately flogged and directed, proved to be a great limitless resource.

The yuck side: bureaucracy

Death and taxes are notoriously inevitable, and in this case the taxes were the belle of the ball: I had to comply with the EU legislation on VAT applied to member states, which makes a sharp distinction between digital goods (images made of impalpable bits) and tangible objects (images printed on palpable paper), thus taxing them slightly differently – bureaucrats love to wallow in such byzantine subtleties. Fortunately enough I have several websites, so I can place the impalpable stuff on one of them and the palpable stuff on another.

The novelty: Tarots on demand


While I was at it I also designed a couple of sets of author-signed tarots to be printed on demand.
It posed some challenges such as finding out the proper paper, learning how to laminate it, improvising a device to cut them out precisely by hand and round up the corners comme il faut, finding the right boxes to dress them up appropriately for their travel to the customer… live and learn 🙂

Have a look at them – you’ll find an (almost) classical deck as well as a retro-steampunk one with a pinch of humor scattered here and there – the latter, I confess, being definitely my favorite 😀

Dante’s Inferno Project

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reposted
It has been quite challenging to produce (with the help of Midjourney) some spectacular and dramatic imagery inspired by the Inferno of Dante’s Divina Commedia.

Dante’s Inferno is a fascinating journey through the nine circles of Hell. This journey isn’t just for kicks; it’s about confronting the consequences of sin and understanding the need for repentance to reach salvation.

Dante places there historical figures and contemporaries, passing judgment on their deeds and misdeeds. It’s a personal and political elegant revenge, wrapped up in an epic narrative. Very cool of him.

From an aesthetic standpoint, the Inferno challenges and expands the boundaries of medieval imagination, blending horror and despair with complex allegories, making it a timeless piece that speaks of the eternal complexities of ethics.


You’ll find my images here.
I enjoyed this Midjourney’s ride, I hope you will too 🙂

How to sell stock images today

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preamble: a professional photographer asked me some hints to sell stock images. I answered her privately. Then I thought that a slightly fleshed-up version of it might also deserve a little corner on my blog.

For decades now I’ve been looking for some magic formula to sell good pictures on the web, and if I had run into an effective one I wouldn’t hesitate to pass it to you. But, alas, that seems fated to stay a dream.
Then let’s put aside the dreams and face today’s reality, so that we can realistically adjust our targets and methods to it, thus sparing us the worst disappointments:

1 – nowadays (and for quite some time) just everyone is a photographer – or believes firmly that she or he is one, even if all they do is tap the screen and upload the picture. What they lack in skills is amply offset by the hi-tech electronics inside the chatter can.

2 – most of the audience – the buying audience – don’t appear very interested in the quality of the images they purchase. I sold at a comparatively high price and/or in impressive quantities pictures that, if not totally dull, were nothing exceptional, whereas a number of really beautiful ones are still there awaiting their first buyer.
An example?
prosecco & pecorino

This image is one of my bestsellers at Adobe with 280 sales until now (from .38 to 26.40 USD each) and keep selling. I am the first to admit that it is nothing special, even if the composition and the content is good.

3 – There seems to be no rationale for the criteria they use to choose which images to purchase – or if there’s one I failed to see it in the last 16 years.

4 – Whoever buys the images prefers the big agencies over the small individual seller, no matter the price, the quality or the professionalism of the agency, as long as it has a name big enough. Possibly (just a wild guess of mine) for they pay out of their client’s pocket, not of their own.

And still, despite such a bleak scenario, I keep making decent money by selling images on the web. How?

In the first place I put in the freezer my ambition to make money by selling art: for my most beautiful pictures I have a couple of private websites that produce a few sales and a lot of satisfaction.

Then I discarded the smallest agencies. Why? Let me explain: I think that Dreamstime is a quite fair agency, but it takes me 2 years to make the same amount I achieve in less than a week by Adobe. Moreover, I would be competing against myself.
Actually I’m selling pretty well at Alamy (the best for me), Adobe and Istock. I obviously discarded Shutterstock, leaving there (in my still open account) only a toilet paper still life.

toilet paper

As for the small agencies, I deleted most of my images there but left my account open: should the situation change I might reconsider coming back again. Except for the ones I really dislike: by them I deleted everything and disappeared in a puff of smoke (a name? Wirestock).
With this tactical approach I saw my income soar… well not enormously but significantly.

And I began listening to the old saying “when you go fishing put a worm on the hook: it’s the fish that must like it, not you” and uploading to the agencies mostly nice but quite ordinary pictures, the kind ordinary people would like and buy.

I hope this helps you rather than discourage you…

My first attempt with RUNWAY

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This is my first attempt to make video with AI.

WOW! I tested RUNWAY (for now just the free version), starting on some Midjourney images of mine and doing my best to add some simple movement. Just for fun (the last famous words… 🙂 ).
The results look pretty promising, – at least to me – although the free version doesn’t allow movies longer than a few seconds.

Here I used this image

and a quite generic prompt “(scuba floating gently away under water with fishes)”.

. Then I reversed the clip for I liked better the scuba coming in rather then fading out.


And here… voilà Charon’s boat stuck in a hellish cave while the souls of the dead are waiting…


In this case I used the brush option to show where and which elements of the image should be involved in the motion: astounding! intuitive, quick and easy. Easier than by prompt.

The Krampus Parade

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It was quite cool to recreate with Midjourney a Krampus night 🙂

What is a Krampus?

It’s a big hairy creature, a blend of beast and human, with horns, a long pointed tongue, fangs, and a very convincing devilish look. The roots of the tradition date to an unspecified pre-christian era, from the European alpine regions.
Several centuries back the heathen Krampus folklore was engulfed into the Christmas tradition as a dark counterpart to St. Nicholas, to remind (mostly the children, but not only) of the possible effects of being naughty rather than nice.
Dozens of such ominous half-goat, half-demon creatures roam the streets during the Christmas season (5th-6th December) rattling chains and bells to warn or punish those who haven’t behaved properly (actually all the bystanders, not a bad assumption 😉 ).
The Krampus parade annual event is really a spine-chilling and oddly fascinating show: it takes more than a while to realize that inside those sinister figures there are playful men that every now and then stop and take off their demonic horned heads to drink a beer or play with absolutely delighted children.

The dark and the wild

Have a look at my AI & I collection and enjoy the gothic artistic side of the Krampus depicted by flogging MidJourney long enough.
13 beautifully suggestive images – occasionally with a hint of humor,

The practical and the funny

If you want to have a look at the real side of the ‘Krampusses’ – to balance the macabre with the fun – just look at my editorial images of the “backstage” of the annual Krampus Run in Munich These are 100% real, live, no AI involved.

The participants take their Krampus get-ups very seriously and spend a lot of money throughout the year to bring the evilness of their creation to perfection: elaborated barbaric fur outfits, heavy artistically carved wooden masks, monstrous horns, long lolling tongues – and more, much more. It’s a great experience to watch those big friendly guys happy even if exhausted by the fatigue of wearing those incredibly heavy costumes, graciously posing for a selfie and accepting kindly the curiosity of the viewers.

As in so many other occurrences, here too the AI complements admirably a professionally used camera, the one siding with fiction, the other with reality. The conflict is so often in the eye of the beholder…