The Content Blender

Gathering dust in the closet is a shoe box of pictures. Among them are snapshots of your beloved pets. Unfortunately, the pictures of Skippy are all too far away for us to enlarge for placing on the wall, and the snapshot of our cute little kitty cat is an unrecognizable blur with eyes lit up like spotlights. Here are some tips to help you create a beautiful close up portrait of your pet.

First you need a decent backg5round. Procure a panel of thin plywood sized about three by five feet. Mix the following colors using tubes of color with flat ceiling paint: one cup of alarizon crimson, one cup of beige, one cup of gray-brown, and one cup of apple green. Paint the whole panel with the gray /brown, then blend in the other colors with a large brush, stroking in a diagonal direction. Keep the center portion light. Blend the paint while still wet, but don’t blend too much or you will hide the different colors.

Use a camera which features a telephoto lens or zoom in the 135mm range which will focus at four feet. Use a medium fast ISO setting (200). Locate a spot lit by strong window light for a source or bounce your flash off a silver 36 inch reflector. If you have to use the built in flash, use a mirror or a piece of foil to angle the light to the side or upwards. Place your pet on a box large enough for your pet to be comfortable. Cover the box with a dark, plain material like velvet, satin or damask. For large dogs, it may be better to work on the floor but be sure to lower the camera to the same height. Black dogs are difficult to capture. Try using a flash off camera with a window or other light behind your pet and to one side just out of range of the lens.

Take a few full length shots and then crop just below the neck for a good close up image. Keep your pet’s eyes slightly to the left or right and a little above the camera lens. On long nosed dogs, make sure you can see both eyes. Make a variety of little noises to keep the ears forward. It is a good idea to have ready several squeaky toys because your dog or cat will only perk up their ears once for each different noise. For small dogs or cats, have a wicker basket ready for them to peek out of. Feel free to make a dozen exposures in order to insure capturing a prize winning expression. Save your background for the next time your pet is photographed. Your final pet masterpiece will be treasured just as your pet is a treasured part of your family.

My first professional animal portrait was a horse!

Probably not on its own, but its an excellent example of how consumers can vote with their buying dollars to sway market demand to bring more environmentally friendly products into the marketplace.

Bamboo flooring is a rising trend in home flooring and a great alternative to traditional hardwood floors. It is the most environmentally friendly natural hardwood flooring alternative you can select for your home, it is a renewable resource, is stronger than steel, and has a greater resistance to expansion and contraction problems associated with temperature and humidity changes.

The bamboo grass is one of the fasted growing plants on the planet, only takes 5 years to grow to maturity, and can provide 25 times the bio mass of a comparable stand of trees. Bamboo is harvested every 5 years, and starts to re-grow immediately with new shoots when harvested. Bamboo is also strong and has a tensile strength exceeding mild steel. It can withstand up to 50,000 pounds of pressure per square inch versus some steels 50,000 psi ratings.

Bamboo flooring is also become a very trendy interior design statement with its rich and beautiful golden earth tones. It is important to shop around for a quality bamboo flooring product that contains no formaldehydes in its binding compounds. Many offshore brands use cheaper binding agents that may contain formaldehydes, and this can cause indoor air pollution problems down the road as all chemical compounds will slowly release their toxins into the air.

So why look to bamboo to save the environment? Bamboo is an excellent replacement product for much of the hardwood species that are being harvested in our global equatorial rainforests. Once harvested, these hardwood species often never grow back due to the thin layers of soil and lack of sunlight under the jungle canopies, and if they do grow back it can take up to 200 years! Our global rainforests are the lungs of our planet and provide a significant contribution to our global oxygen production, second only to the ocean.

By selecting bamboo flooring you reduce the consumption demand for rainforest hardwood materials, and in the process help save to the environment for our future generations. For more information and tips on bamboo flooring visit: http://www.laminateflooringzone.com/bamboo-flooring.htm

About the Author

About the Author

S.A. Smith is a freelance writer, contributor, and editor of the Laminate Flooring Zone and can be reached at http://www.laminateflooringzone.com

How great of an idea is it that you can study abroad while in high school? It is so good for teenagers to get out of their own country and spend some time somewhere else. The best part about a foreign exchange program is that the students get to stay in a local families home, so they get a true experience of what the culture is like. It is not like a tourist vacation where you only get to see and experience the tourist activities, this is real living, day-to-day experiences that offers up a dose of true culture. The food from different cultures will bring a great deal of diversity to the palate, and if you end up eating too much and packing on some undesired body weight, Acceletrim could be used to drop the extra pounds off the waist.

The world would be a much more open place if that for all four years of high school each and every year a few months would be spent in another country and in a local home, and in a local school. It does not cost anything if two students do a complete switch up. One goes and the other one comes, pretty simple. A great deal of language can be leaned in a few months and if each student spent a few months for each four years of school in a different country that spoke different languages, they could become fluent in four languages. The best learning and experience is done in the true settings of culture, and we all hope that this can become a reality in the near future.

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Good Luck!

One of the best tried and proven ways to fill a boat full of keeper trout and redfish is using a live shrimp under a popping cork. I prefer to use a treble hook, leaving about 18-24 inches of line between the hook and the popping cork, depending on the depth of water the fish are in. If I am fishing a shallow reef, then I shorten the length of line between the cork and the hook to prevent hang-ups, but if I am working birds, I want the shrimp to work a little deeper so I lengthen the line.

Working reefs with live shrimp under a popping cork is the way to go as opposed to using artificial lures. You can catch both redfish and trout with the same set up instead of having to change lure types and colors to match what the fish are eating.

Make sure you entice the fish by popping the cork. The rattle mimics the sound a trout makes when it sucks in bait at the surface of water. By popping the cork, you are also moving the shrimp around, increasing the chances that it is noticed and eaten by your potential dinner.

When the fish are feeding, you will never go wrong using live shrimp under a popping cork. Last summer I fished a few reefs in the Port Lavaca area with a good friend of mine. After the shrimp hit the water and three quick pops of the cork, a fish was on. We limited out on trout in 30 minutes and had a couple of nice reds in the boat. His wife thought we had motor trouble because we were back at the house so soon.

Good luck fishing.

Aaron Ralston is the owner of Gulf Coast Guide Reports located at: http://www.gulfcoastguidereports.com Gulf Coast Guide Reports provides saltwater fishing reports by the best guides along the gulf coast from Port Isabel, Texas all the way to the Florida Keys, fishing articles, tips, tournament information, and just about anything else you want to know about fishing. Get the latest news today.