For the past year, we’ve been working on a software application for online communities. The system currently makes it possible for you to create a niche website, blog, and business card. You can create and join groups and talk to others via a messaging system. Your profile is listed in a directory based on your location and other criteria that’s specific to the community.

The first version was launched at the beginning of 2009 and is geared towards working professionals that wish to expand their reach and marketing efforts. If you’re a self-employed, freelance, or small business professional, you will benefit greatly from this website because it gives you a place to blog about your talents, products, and services. You are allowed to link back to your own website which gives you a boost in search engine rankings and brings people directly to your site. So far, we have accountants, lawyers, business owners, marketers, real estate agents, and photographers using the site.

We’d like to extend an invitation to you to take a look at http://www.prospotlight.com

ProSPOTLIGHT is a great place to gain additional exposure to your talents especially if you are trying to start or build a business. We know as much as anybody that it’s expensive to market yourself either online or offline, and therefore a place like ProSPOTLIGHT.com will greatly aide in your efforts because it’s currently 100% free to use.

ProSPOTLIGHT is also being used by job-seekers as a homepage to send potential employers to for more information about their talents. A well written spotlight could be the tipping point that convinces an employer that you’re the right person for the job. You also have the ability to link out to many of the other sites that you use such as your Facebook account, your Monster resume, your LinkedIn profile, etc.

To give you an example of what can be done, I’ve created a spotlight for my nature photography at http://www.prospotlight.com/pro/naturephotography - I intend to use this to show off my best nature and wildlife images.

We hope you like the new site, and we welcome any feedback that you might have. Feel free to comment here or send me a message using ProSPOTLIGHT’s messaging system.

Thanks,
Brian

PS The directory system is ordered by ‘points’, which you earn by being active on the site. For example, if you write a blog post, you will earn points. Those with the most points show up first for their country, state/region, city, and occupation. Those at or near the top will receive more traffic, leads, and sales than those at the bottom simply because people choose the first options more often.

Once you sign up, be sure to direct people to your spotlight. Any person that visits one of your pages first and then registers an account will be flagged as your referral. You will earn bonus points for any points your referral earns, which will help you move higher up on the directory pages.

Over the last year, I’ve been creating a professional network named ProSPOTLIGHT.  The site offers a blog, website, and directory listing for professionals of any occupation or location.  This makes it possible for a professional to market themselves in their local area.  So far, we have real estate agents, lawyers, photographers, marketers, and others using the site to help generate traffic and leads to their products and services.

Many people believe the Nessie, Loch Ness Monster is an evolved Plesiosaur. These dinosaurs were carnivorous aquatic reptiles with long necks and the body in the shape of a turtle without a shell. These dinosaurs were first found in England, so it is possible that one or more survived through the ages; however, the plesiosaur’s neck wasn’t designed to bend upward to the degree that they could left their heads above the water as most Nessie pictures show. Even if they could, gravity would have tipped their body forward which would keep most of their neck in the water. It is possible for their head to reach the surface, but not in the typical “Nessie pose”. Nessie has also been thought to be some sort of long necked seal, an eel, an unknown amphibian species, or some sort of invertebrate. It could also be a plesiosaur that has evolved from their fossilized ancestors.

Loch Ness is the largest body of fresh water in Britain. It’s 754 feet deep, 22.5 miles long, and 1-1.5 miles wide. It is said that the loch never freezes, which could account for how the dinosaur survived through the ages. Below 100 feet, the temperature of the water never varies from 44 degrees Fahrenheit due to a thermocline. There is a large cavern system deep in the lake where Nessie is thought to hide.

The Loch Ness Monster has been a popular myth since at least 1933, but there have been reported sitings since as early as 565 by Saint Columbia, who wrote that a beast rose from the loch and attacked a man swimming out to retrieve a boat.

Over the past 4 years, people have debated the monster’s existence on a picture I took of a statue at Eccles Dinosaur part of a Plesiosaur on my photo gallery at The Lens Flare. On this page, I ask the question, could this dinosaur be the ancestor of the Loch Ness Monster? People have misinterpreted my question as “Is this the real Nessie?” and hundreds of people have commented.

The picture recently reached 100,000 views and is the first image on The Lens Flare to do so largely due to the fact that it often shows up on the first page of Google’s image search for phrases like “Loch Ness Monster” and other variations, and the number of visits to this picture per week has dramatically increased since the show “The Water Horse” hit the big screen putting Nessie back in the spotlight. I invite you to take part in the conversation of Nessie on my picture The Loch Ness Monster’s Great Great Granddad.

One of the most exciting things about digital photography is not the camera itself, but what you can do with the photo after the fact using various software programs such as Photoshop.

A fun thing to do is to take multiple images and merge them together forming a composite image. A person might add a sky, mountain, or flower to an interesting sky or they might add animals such as deer or birds where there weren’t any previously. Sometimes different landscape elements are added such as a nice looking tree or rock outcropping, and sometimes it’s as simple as swapping out a boring sky for one that’s much more exciting.

It’s easy to add elements to a picture, but much harder to make them look right when all of the layers are put together. Little pieces of grass and other artifacts are common and time consuming to remove. Photoshop’s Extract tool is a good place to start. It will help you remove an object from one image so that you can copy it into another. It does a decent job of getting the edges right, but you’ll need to fine tune it some. What I do is duplicate the layer, then extract the object out of the duplicate. I convert this new object to gray scale and copy it to a layer mask. A layer mask is a gray scale layer that allows portions of the layer below it to be shown. The different gray values translate to opacity values. By converting the extracted layer to gray scale, I have a pretty good representation of the object that needs to be seen. I then paint on white and/or black to the edges of the layer mask to fix any edge problems in the original extracted layer. Once I have my perfectly extracted object, I can include that layer and its mask into the composite image and position it accordingly. Sometimes there are a few pixels that seem out of place once the layers have been combined, so I’ll fix those individually by zooming in and then I use the clone stamp tool to edit out the problems.

Extracting objects is really an art form all to itself. To do this so, you’ll need to know how to use the extract tool in Photoshop and how layer masks work, which I’m sure there are countless tutorials on the Internet that show you exactly how to use both. If you don’t have Photoshop, check to see if your photo editing software supports these things. If not, you can buy Photoshop Elements for about $99.

Doug Hough from my photo gallery, The Lens Flare, has a lot of really great composites, and the thumbnail in this article was created by Donwrob.

Nature photography is one of my favorite hobbies because I love being out in the wilderness capturing unique slices in time that may never be seen exactly that same way again.  For a hundred dollars, a person can buy a digital point and shoot camera and get started in this great hobby, but the price tag can get steep really fast. A person can be tempted into buying expensive DSLR cameras and a full array of lenses.  Fortunately, there are ways to shoot better nature photographs (and photos in general), that don’t cost an extra penny except in time experimenting and practicing various techniques. I’ve written an article on several tips to improve your nature photography without buying new equipment. It’s worth reading for anybody contemplating the art and hobby of shooting photographs of the wild.

Of course, at some point, a person may decide that it’s worth the expense to upgrade their camera equipment to shoot professional grade photos.  When that time comes, my nature photography blog has tips and other helpful information on camera equipment and other topics related to nature photography.

About a month ago, I had surgery on my foot.  When I was a child my feet were usually too big for my shoes, which caused my big toe to bend inward.  Where the joint bent, a bone deposit grew and kept growing. Last winter, I went skiing and since the boots don’t give like shoes do, my foot was basically crushed in the boot.  After a night of skiing, blisters formed and popped leaving a sock caked in blood.  Two weeks later, I tried to go ice skating and it hurt so bad I took the boots off after about 5 minutes.

After talking to the doctor, he said that he could fix it and if I didn’t get it fixed, it would likely get worse.  Fixing it involved cutting the bone growth out, breaking the toe, removing all the ligaments and cartilage from the knuckle, drilling a pin from the outside into the bone, and putting a screw in there to help fuse the bones and keep it all together.

The first week after the surgery was hell.  I slept most of the time with the help of some pain pills, and it was mostly a blur except I remember it being really uncomfortable to sleep with a surgical boot, which acts like a caste.  After the first week, I started taking the boot off to sleep and actually got a good night’s sleep.  Since then it has progressively healed.  I have two more weeks to go with this boot and my right foot will be healed.  After that, I need to have the left foot done, which will start the whole thing over again.

What an ordeal… but it’ll make it possible for me to do the things that I like to do, namely hiking & skiing.  Anything that requires the use of any type of boot will now be a lot easier to deal with.  Hopefully, this will help make it easier to meet some of my other health goals.

One of my goals is to fix up the yard.  It looks horrible right now, and I want to make it nice and hospitable.  Each year, I try and add a few plants around the house, and most of the time, I forget what I planted, how big they are supposed to get, etc.

This year, I’m going to write down what I’ve planted and their care instructions.

In the flowerbed below our front window, I planted 3 Fold Coin Asteriscus plants. They are yellow perennial flowers that are supposed to end up 3′ wide and 1′ tall.  They are full sun, require low amounts of water, and will survive at 30 degrees F or above.  The card states that it is a compact matting to mounding evergreen perennial that has dark yellow, wide-disked, daisy-like flowers that rest atop elliptical, silky, green leaves.  Blooms winter to spring and blooms with some flowers all year.  The minimum temperature of 30 degrees might make it so it dies this next winter, so we’ll have to see.

I also bought 3 purple/mauve wallflowers for the same flower garden as the Asteriscus plants.  The wallflower is a full sun plant, requires a medium amount of water, flowers in the spring, will get 30 inches tall and 18 inches wide and is hearty up to -40 degrees F.  The card states that it has fragrant flowers that are great in the rock gardens, cut, or planted with spring-flowering bulbs.

We also planted a rose bush in the same area with redish-orange blooms.  It sort of sticks out because of the contrasting colors, so if the yellow flowers die this year, we may change it up with more red flowers next year.

In the back yard, we planted 2 flowering pear trees.  One of them is supposed to get 30′ tall and 40′ wide, while the other one will get 30′ tall and 20′ wide.  We positioned them so that they’ll eventually block some of the sun on our house in the late summer evenings to help cool down the house.

I also have a 20′ tall blue spruce in the back yard, and a 8′ tall apple tree.

All of the new plants received a dose of root starter fertilizer, the existing trees got some tree spike fertilizer that’s supposed to be slow acting so that the tree will get it’s food all year long.  Everything also got a dose of insect repellent, which is poured into the ground and sucked up through the roots.  The apple tree was especially bad with earwigs last year, so hopefully this will help.

I’m pleased to announce that the 3rd revision of The Lens Flare is now live. The Lens Flare is a large friendly community of artists and photographers who use the site to upload images, share ideas, and learn from each other. It’s located at http://www.thelensflare.com

To quickly recap the new features, they include:

• More Images: Up to 500 images on the basic free account, 1000 images for silver, and unlimited for the gold account.
• Less expensive to upgrade your account.
• Multiple Image Sizes: 150px thumbnail, 500px standard image, 900px large image, and 2 250px detail images.
• Dashboard - to quickly get to important links.
• Albums - to organize your pictures however you want.
• Videos - updated art and photography videos from YouTube.
• Camera Reviews - to help you decide on which camera to purchase.
• Search - the search page has been improved.
• Image Categories - categories are formed automatically based on the pictures on the site.
• Member Profile - customize your homepage with the profile fields.
• Stat Counter - view traffic to your pages, where in the world they come from, etc by integrating your statcounter.com account with your pages on The Lens Flare. To do this, add your stat counter codes on your profile page.
• Image Management - easier management of your images, with stats showing traffic trends over the last 7 and 30 days to your pictures.
• Less Spam - spam registrations and crude comments will be far fewer with the addition of several features to hinder automated programs from submitting information to the site.
• New Look and Feel - the site’s look and feel has been completely redone to promote a more professional appearance.

Thank you and I look forward to seeing you on the website.

–
http://www.thelensflare.com - Art and Photography Community Gallery

One of my goals is to have a million visitors combined for all of my websites in a year.  In 2007, 412,425 people visited my websites, with the majority of them going to The Lens Flare, my photography and art community.  I’ve been working on a new version of that site for several months and have just released a beta version to the members of that community.  In about two weeks, I plan on making the beta version live.  The new site is so much better, I’m hoping that it will attract a million visitors in 2008. 

I’ve been using my Lucasi pool cue for about a month or so now and love it.  The shaft is slightly smaller in diameter from the typical house cue, which helps me put more English on the ball. It has a really smooth wood feel. I don’t like shafts with a luster finish such as a typical Cuetec cue because it tends to skid along my bridge hand, and I’m constantly buffing it with a piece of leather.  Not so, with the Lucasi maple shaft. 

The tip is pretty soft which grips the ball for even more control. Soft tips probably don’t last as long as a hard tip, but I feel that it really helps my game, so it’s worth it.

It hits the ball really solid, and this might be all in my head, but I feel that my game has improved since getting the stick.