Just wanted to give Brock and Dave over at Infinet Design a big shout out for working hard last night and this morning to fix the issue where all the text from my posts got deleted.  Between the last back-up of my blog from June 1st and a recent history of my posts in Dave's RSS feeder, they were able to completely restore all my babblings, and I didn't have to do a thing.  If you're looking for some top notch web design help and unbeatable customer service, Brock & Dave are your guys. Thanks again, gentlemen!

I was working with the guys at Infinet Design to make a few back end changes to the blog this morning when a little glitch popped up that erased all the text entries from my posts prior to this one.  Oops.  They're working hard to resolve the issue, and my web hosting company is supposed to have back-ups, so I've got my fingers crossed... 245 posts is a little daunting to think about losing.  I guess the bright side would be that Kylie's spell-checking duties just got much easier.

The wonderful Skye Hardwick, half of the Soul Sistas duo (along with Michele Huesgen) and a fantastically talented children's photographer, was kind enough to interview me over on the Soul Sistas blog to discuss - among other things - married life, my photography, the new textures, what inspires me, and my [lack of a diverse] music library. I met sky at a workshop she put on last year in Austin. If you haven't seen her work, be prepared to spend some time getting lost in the beauty of her images over on her site. I've never met another photographer that captures these amazing looks on kids faces like Skye does. Thanks, Skye for the gracious offer to interview me. To read the interview, click here.

I'm ridiculously excited to announce the new Firenze Italian Texture Collection is available for purchase. Of the hundreds of textures I photographed in breath-taking Italy, I included in this set the 38 that I use most frequently in creating my fine art images. Now they are available for you to use as your own. Each texture is a 300dpi jpg that can be customized in terms of size, color, contrast, etc and can be layered with other textures to create endless variations of looks that will give any image a rich, intricate fine art feel. I’ve tested the templates with Photoshop CS, CS2 and CS3, and everything works fine. It may work for earlier versions before CS, I just haven’t tested for those. I believe the textures will work flawlessly in Photoshop Elements as well. In addition, when you purchase the textures, you will receive a link to a video tutorial I created to show you how I use the textures and how - in only a couple minutes - you can layer these textures to create stunning works of art. If you are interested, please send payment ($75) via PayPal to mail@mattnicolosi.com, and I will email you a download link for the textures as quickly as possible, and certainly within 24 hours of receiving your payment. Please be sure to include your correct email address with your PayPal payment. Cost: $75 (includes 37 of my most popular Italian textures and a video tutorial showing you how to use them) Sorry, no individual texture purchases at this time, only the set. Due to the nature of the product, exchanges and refunds are not possible. However, if you change your mind before I send out the links - I am happy to offer you credit. Please let me know if you have any questions at all.

Here's a couple samples showing only a handful of the endless possibilities you can create by combining & blending these textures.

I get questions about the gear I'm using pretty frequently, so I'm not sure what took me so long to do a post where I list stuff out, but here it is. I guess it takes a while for the light bulb cloud to pop-up above my head sometimes... Here's what's in my bag. You can also find this list permanently added in the "LINKS" section near the top of the blog.

And because posts without pictures are not as fun, here's a gem I dug up from 1997 taken by another photographer for reason's which will remain undisclosed. The quality's not so good; it was WAY back in '97 after all... practically a millennium ago in photography technology. And the retouching is less than stellar (c'mon, I've got white specs on my black shirt... who missed that?), but it's funny to look back on it today. BTW, for those of you that know what this picture is for... pipe down. Remember, I'm sure I could dig up a few embarrassing images of y'all for blog fodder as well.