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Just to recap my Websites

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Online there are several websites of mine, each one with a specific purpose and leading theme, thus it’s pretty easy to get lost among them.
As my uncontrolled interests range farther than that, I think it’s a good idea to contrive a simple summary page like this:

Uh, oh may be it is a true addiction…
I just added a new website!

AI Art Microsets

Small AI Art collections ready to use – Small sets, small prices, no unnecessary complications.

Web-ankh [DE-IT]: is the site of my web services agency.

There are quite a lot of web services agencies out there, but I think I can offer also something more: in particular
– a thorough protection suite against web malware, inclusive of firewall, updating and frequent backups for just in case.
– plenty of experience about online shops to sell digital goods – comes in handy more often than you think.
Gameover’s Atelier AI & I: this site ( also reachable as Luisa Fumi Digital Art) reflects my unrestrained curiosity about AI-generated art.

I tested so many dedicated AI systems and I think that for the time being Midjourney is the best: not easy to prompt, sometimes sort of “moody” (laugh if you wish), but really unique as results.
Here I present the outcomes of my fights with Midjourney (only the ones I won 🙂 upsized and post-processed in a traditional way.
I’m enthralled by this experiment and keep having a lot of fun with them.

All the images are “ethical”: they do not reference copyrighted characters, living artists, brands, or recognizable individuals.

To flesh out the site there are also a “Cover Art” section, a “mini-clips” page and a Print On Demand Gallery.
Professional photography: a site to show off my skills and my long extensive experience as photographer.

Mostly editorial and travel images from all around the world – untouched by AI hands 😊.
Hosted by Picfair, the site offers also a Print-on-demand service.

I’m thinking of expanding this site to more artistic stuff like exclusive cover art (a different taste from my corresponding AI covers). We’ll see.
Antikstock: last but definitely not least.
A rich collection of curated images (mostly engravings) from the past, all scanned from ancient books manically collected over a lifetime, all painstakingly restored from the damages of the centuries, all free from copyright issues (due to their venerable age).

I’m interested of images that speak to one another, forming complete visual worlds rather than disconnected fragments. Single images from the past, isolated from their context, often lose part of their meaning.

Working with historical imagery often means long research times, inconsistent quality, and stylistic mismatches.
Curated sets solve this by offering visual consistency, contextual coherence, and immediate usability:
press history, old magazine advertising, botanical art, medieval marine monsters, antique Egypt history and art… does it ring a bell?

And yes, I almost forgot it… there’s also my blog here.
I have a lot of fun writing it, hope you’ll enjoy reading it and commenting (unless you’re a troll – in which case you’ll be fed to our pirañas 😄).

Hosting vs. Customer – the usual script

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You find something’s wrong with your website – alright, sh*t happens, don’t panic. First things first, you check all you can on your side (WordPress, plugins etc.), but everything looks OK.
Oh oh… then there’s one and only one thing to do: call your host’s secret… opps, support service.

And the ordeal begins.

Exception: BoostedHost is one of my host and it seems to be still human 🙂

First step


Instead of the polite competent expert you were expecting, on the other end of the chatline you find an AI (Artificial OK but not necessarily Intelligent) tasked with getting rid of the most inexperienced or naive customers by suggesting that the issue is their own fault (“Was your computer properly plugged-in? Then you probably did this, or this, or that…”.

Note: you can skip this step by just opening a ticket and hoping for a fast reply thus saving one PITA.

Second step


Once you manage to clear the hurdle (sometimes just shouting a couple of times “I want to talk to a human!!!” works fine), you’re put in contact with a junior serviceperson full of goodwill who does his/her best to understand your problem within the limits of his/her skimpy competence, to empathize with your sufferance and to praise you for your patience.
Don’t be harsh, he/she isn’t there to solve your issue but rather to pass on your complaint to a senior serviceperson. If you manage to hold your temper throughout those first two steps, you’re worthy of their attention.

Third step


The senior serviceperson sounds somewhat competent and professional (can tell a cache from a cake, and even more), listens to your complaints, suggests a couple of tests you already run as a matter of course, looks a bit annoyed that you thought of them first, then solves the issue by blaming you for doing something you know you didn’t.

Fourth step


With your nerves on edge you pay a visit to ChatGPT and tell it in detail the established facts and your hypotheses – GPT is a gentlebeing and thus listens patiently without interrupting or jumping to conclusions.
From it you get all the understanding you need to placate you and a nice list of 3rd-degree questions to grill the senior serviceperson with (“yes or no, no maybe’s!”).

Fifth step


The senior serviceperson (not necessarily the one you already met), crushed by GPT’s 3rd-degree questions, finally admits that one of them hit the bull’s eye and the problem is actually their fault.
Without a word of apology or regret for their indifference and/or incompetence – the customer’s always wrong, huh?

My crystal ball says…

Dark clouds are gathering on the horizon:

many hosting companies are excited to announce that the AI is on board, ready to ‘help’ you design your websites to your taste, no web knowledge needed – just warm up and serve.

I’m afraid that such a grand entrance will encourage the Big Bosses to regard human competence as even more irrelevant than it is today. Then why squander dear money in expensive junior and senior servicepeople while the AI can take care of the customer support as well?
Let me hope that at least it will be ChatGPT…

However at this point I’m wondering if there’s still space enough in my cellar for a small, old-fashioned tower desktop to configure as a server 🙁

My websites: from Archive to Curated Collections

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Over the years, my websites have gradually grown into very large image archives, bringing together historical reproductions, restored engravings, and AI-generated visual work.
Many visitors have explored them freely, sometimes using individual images as references, illustrations, or inspiration in ways I often discovered only by chance.

Recently, however, I began to feel that this structure no longer reflected the way I actually work.
Single images, isolated from their context, often lose part of their meaning.

What interests me increasingly is not accumulation, but coherence: images that speak to one another, forming complete visual worlds rather than disconnected fragments.

I was also aware that my customers often prefer to buy several images of similar content instead of a single one (botanical illustrations, more photos of a business center together, portraits of 18th century scientists, just to name a few).

For this reason, the sites are gradually being reorganized around curated thematic sets.
Here two of them on Antikstock



This transition also allows the visual material to be presented more clearly and consistently, while preserving the possibility of acquiring individual images when needed.

A smaller selection of standalone images and free resources will remain available, while new curated sets will continue to be added over time.
If you are interested in licensing or acquiring a specific image from a set, feel free to get in touch directly.

Thank you to everyone who has visited, shared, referenced, or quietly followed these archives over the years.

Editorial Photography: Quantumhenge

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“Formation of a quantumhenge” megalith monument of granite, artwork of Judith Neunhäuserer in front of the Center for Quantum Engineering at TUM campus in Garching of the Technical University of Munich.

The art inspiration was an iconic quantum experiment from Crommie M.F., Lutz C.P., Eigler D.M. “Confinement of electrons to quantum corrals on a metal surface“, in: Science. 1993. V. 262.P. 218ff. (painstakingly copied from the board there 🙂 )


Suggestive, indeed, and discovered by chance, driving along the campus.
The first impression was surprise “How! Why nobody told me that we have a megalith Stonehenge here!”
Then came the curiosity.

Walking around it, I thought I saw a piece looking like the Rosetta stone inside the circle.



Worth a visit, definitely!

The Café-Library — Open at Night

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I’m quietly transforming my websites.
The idea is to offer full sets of selected images built around a focused idea — a set of visuals that share the same atmosphere and narrative thread, designed as a complete package ready for illustrators, designers, publishers, and anyone who needs consistent imagery with a strong personality and immediate usability.

One of my curated sets is The Café-Library open at night
I’ve ever been and still am fascinated by books – don’t know how many thousands I have at home – thus the idea seems fabolous to me:

a bookshop-café open all night with the option to sit quiet and read a book (rented or bought), and at the first morning light, with a warm latte and a book in your hand, to go back to your place and sleep the day.

The atmosphere draws loosely from literary and real references – from Gianrico Carofiglio’s Osteria, to many brillant works of Walter Moers, to the Library Bar in Copenhagen.
Then came my imagination: the quiet pedestrian streets of an Italian downtown, dim light all around, most of it coming from a cheerful open bookshop with tables and seats outside or inside, with people sitting there, reading comfortably and sipping a coffee.
Every so often at the same table sit two people, occasionally they talk together but usually they are as good as alone, each one completely absorbed in their reading.
Sometimes under a vaulted ceiling of one of these coffee-bookshops someone sits at the piano in a corner and plays a soft tune.
Not easy feeding the feeling to Midjourney, but I’m happy with the result of a consistent, common atmosphere.

Et voilà some of the 16 selected images from the set:

In a time of constant distraction, the idea of a place dedicated to open, welcoming, uninterrupted reading looks quietly radical to me 😀

Une petite note for the AI-skeptics:

If you feel like writing a piece of poetry you’ll probably use a word processor, if only because today stylus, nibs and ink aren’t all that easy to find. And no one will dream of claiming that the real poet is the word processor you typed on and not you.
Things change if you use a sophisticated AI as a writing tool, but not by much: there’s still something essential, let’s call it ‘the human touch’, that you must provide yourself lest the outcome sound somewhat dull, insipid – even though there’s always the simpleton who takes the bite and congratulates, but that’s another story 😉

Same goes if you use a sophisticated graphic AI to give body to a dream you found in your mind, that otherwise would take you days or months to draw or paint with your own hands: if you want it to evoke the feelings that inspired you, the human touch must come from you.
Hard – if ever possible – to tell what this mysterious human touch really is: it’s something that you feel, not that you understand. Something related to the rustle of old pages under your fingers, to the smell of an ancient leather binding, to a gentle breeze ruffling your hair, to the taste of an early coffee, to the faint memory of a happy moment lost in the past… and this is as far as I go.
A tool is a tool is a tool.

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.

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 😀

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…