What The Shih Tzu Owner Should Know About Grooming Part Ii: Getting To Know Grooming Equipment

If you dont have good equipment there is no way you will have a well groomed Shih Tzu. As with all jobs, proper tools are essential to doing a job well.

Clippers

One of the most important pieces of equipment is the clipper. For a Shih Tzu owner grooming only one Shih Tzu, one of the best is Oster with snap-on blades. The blades can be changed easily. Various blades needed are No. 10, No. 7 and No. 4. No. 10 will give you a complete shave down. No. 7 blade will give you not so close of a cut as the No. 10. No 4 blade will give you the stylish puppy cut that so many Shih Tzu pet owners like for their pet Shih Tzu.

Combs

You will need a fine-toothed comb and a medium-toothed comb. You will also need a very tiny comb to comb the hair on the face. Combs with metal handles are more durable.

Brushes

The brush is very important. While the professional groomer who grooms all the breeds will need a variety of brushes, the Shih Tzu owner will need the proper brushes for a Shih Tzu. A soft wire slicker brush is the best for fluff-drying. It can be used to remove tangles from the Shih Tzus coat, but it must be used very gently. The hard wire slicker is used to remove mats. A pin brush is used for tidying the long hair of a Shih Tzu. It cannot be used for hard brushing. If your Shih Tzus hair is fine, you can use a natural-bristle brush made of boar bristles. A vegetable brush or toothbrush can be used on all the places that are hard to get at, especially on the face, around and between the eyes of the Shih Tzu.

Use a spray conditioner when brushing your Shih Tzus hair. The conditioner should have a lanolin base and should not contain alcohol. Alcohol can discolor and dry out the hair of the Shih Tzu. If you do not have the correct type on hand, use plain water in a spray bottle. When you use coat conditioner or water when brushing your Shih Tzus hair, you will prevent static electricity and causing the hair to break.

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Connie Limon is a Shih Tzu breeder. Purchase Shih Tzu puppies and sign up for FREE Shih Tzu newsletter at http://www.stainglassshihtzus.com Pet care articles at http://smalldogs2.com/ShihTzuCastle Visit Camelot articles at http://www.camelotarticles.com

New Smile New Confidence, Affordable Cosmetic Dentistry Procedures

You may believe cosmetic dentistry procedures are only for the rich and famous. However, many procedures are much more affordable than you think; so thanks to great new financing options, you too can have the smile youve always imagined.

Celebrated Hollywood cosmetic dentist Dr. Sands explains how people from all walks of life can have the perfect smile:

A lot of people think of cosmetic procedures as a luxury that only the very affluent can afford, but thats just not the case. While some cosmetic procedures can be slightly expensive, several others are extremely affordable--and all are well-worth the results.

Most peoples insurance will not cover cosmetic dentistry procedures, so for those procedures that you might require a little help to afford, there are several easy financing options. Companies like Capital One and GE Money have noticed the problem of affordable medical-care and have created special credit cards just for health related expenses. With quite a few finance plans to choose from, theres no reason to hesitate undergoing a smile-enhancing procedure.

CareCredit
CareCredit offers no interest financing or low minimum monthly payments for your cosmetic dentistry procedure. There are no up-front costs, no annual fees and no pre-payment penalties. The simple, three-step application process and instant approval, means that your cosmetic dental financing will be arranged in just minutes. CareCredit offers no interest on payment plans up to 18 months and low monthly payments on plans up to 60 months. Since CareCredit is a GE Money Company with a 20-year track record, you can rest assured that you are in good hands. CareCredit can be used at any of the 75,000 participating healthcare practices nationwide.

PulseCard
Endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatric Dentists, the Academy of General Dentists, the Academy of Family Practitioners and the Academy of Cosmetic Dentists, PulseCard is the only national credit card created solely to pay for health care related items. The PulseCard credit card allows you to keep all your dental expenses on one statement and gives you a 2% rebate on all purchases. The approval rate for patient financing from PulseCard is 40%. The current APR is prime +9.9%.

Capital One Healthcare Finance (Dental Fee Plan)
Along with Care Credit, Capital One Healthcare Finance (previously known as Dental Fee Plan) is considered an industry leader in cosmetic dentistry financing. Capital One Healthcare Finance makes cosmetic dental procedures affordable for any budget. Capital One Healthcare Finance can help to pay for procedure costing anywhere from $300 to $25,000. Low, fixed-rate installment loans and interest-free loans are available.

PFS Patient Financing
PFS Financing offers loans and lines of credit up to $25,000 for your cosmetic dentistry procedures. You can apply online, ask your cosmetic dentist for an application, or call PFS Financing at 888-737-3679.The application process is simple and easy and an approval is usually be provided in minutes. Monthly payments can be quite low, with the number of payments usually falling in the 24-84 month range. The interest rate will depend on your credit score.

One of these financing options may be the ticket to a brighter you. If you have dreamed about correcting your smile with porcelain veneers, teeth whitening, dental bonding, or any other great cosmetic dentistry procedure, but always worried about the cost of such procedures, you need worry no more. Visit the websites of these financial service companies for more information, and make sure to ask your cosmetic dentist which plans are accepted in the office.

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Taking Panoramic Landscapes - The Easy Solution

I love panoramas. There's something very appealing about their shape. It's probably because we see the world more in these dimensions than the near square format of standard film/sensor frames. It might also explain the upsurge in the popularity of widescreen TVs!

Panoramas have a reputation of being hard to take. There are dedicated panorama cameras available but unless you've got at least a thousand dollars to spare, you probably can't afford one! But you can take panoramas with any kind of camera.

All a panorama is, is a sequence of images where you turn slightly for each different frame. In the old days, before PCs and the likes of Photoshop were around, you'd take your prints (there wasn't much point in shooting panoramas on slide film, for obvious reasons), lay them out on a table and position them over each other where they overlapped. A bit of sticky tape held them together. [As a side note, this technique was used by NASA to build up mosaic pictures of the planets and satellites their spaceprobes visited, up till the late '70s/early 80s when computers were introduced to make the process less laborious].

Now that PCs and image manipulation packages are easy to come by, high-quality panoramas can now be created by anyone. If you're shooting slide or negative film, you will need to have your images scanned before you do anything else.

DIY Panoramas
The idea behind taking panoramas with SLR cameras is that the camera is rotated around its nodal point during each successive exposure. What's the Nodal Point? It's the point inside your camera where the light rays converge and flip over. It's different for different focal lengths (on zoom lenses) and for different prime lenses (fixed focal length lenses like a standard 50mm lens). It's important to rotate about this point to eliminate image mismatches due to changes in parallax. Parallax is the apparent shift of an object against a background due to a change in observer position.

Just to be clear, the Nodal Point is not the same as the film/sensor plane. Generally, for most SLR cameras and lenses, the Nodal Point is located somewhere towards the center of the lens barrel and lies in front of the image/sensor plane.

The Problem With Parallax
Parallax is easily demonstrated by a simple experiment. Hold up your finger about 1 foot in front of your face and alternately open and close your left and right eyes. You'll notice that your finger shifts left and right with respect to the background depending on which eye is open. Try another experiment: With your finger still raised, close one eye and turn your head from side to side. Notice how your finger moves with respect to the background. This relative movement is due to the fact that youre not rotating your head around your eyes nodal point, which is somewhere in the center of your eyeball. Instead, youre rotating about your spine which is several inches to the rear and off to one side. It is this relative side-to-side motion that we try to eliminate when setting up a camera for panoramas. [If you want to read up more about parallax, Wikipedia have a good explanatory article.]

Now, if you consider a camera held up to your face - it will suffer even greater parallax errors as it's farther from your spine (the point of rotation of your head) than your eye. It's surprisingly common for people to take panoramas in this fashion and then find the individual pictures don't match up.

So use a tripod and rotate the camera on the tripod. The parallax errors will be significantly smaller but there will still be some error involved. However, the images will match up better than with the head rotation method.

Mechanical Contraptions
What perfectionists strive for is to have the camera rotate about the nodal point. There are brackets and contraptions available that will let you offset your camera from the tripod's axis of rotation and with a little experimentation and trial and error, you can position your camera so that its nodal point is directly over the axis of rotation of the bracket. Getting this spot-on means your images should line up perfectly.

A few months ago I bought such a bracket - the Kaidan Kiwi. This comes in two halves which produce an L-shaped bracket. Its instruction manual explains how to set it up and find the nodal point for your camera and lens. However, you have to get your tripod perfectly level before using it, otherwise you end up with a curved panorama rather than a straight one.

I've had good success using this bracket, but it is large and heavy and certainly a bit too cumbersome to be carrying on long walks or while away on vacation.

AutoStitch To The Rescue
Then I recently came across a free bit of software called AutoStitch. Written by a couple of students at the University of Columbia, this takes all of the heartache out of creating panoramas. All you do is select the size of the final image and tell it what images you want it to stitch. It then goes off and produces your panorama.

It really is that simple. Unless successive images are radically different in exposure (i.e. one image to too light or dark compared to another), it seamlessly blends them. It performs all the warping of the images necessary to get them to align (other software I've used can cause ghosting in the overlap areas where it hasn't quite aligned the images). It also aligns multiple rows of images rather than just a single strip.

Even better, it doesn't require you to set up your camera to rotate about its nodal point. When I was in Crete last year, I tried shooting a few panoramas with my Canon EOS 300D held up to my eye (I didn't have a tripod with me). When I got home, I tried stitching the pictures together using various bits of software (including software dedicated to stitching images together) and didn't get satisfactory results. I knew, though, that it was because I'd swivelled the camera about my spine. But I tried these images with AutoStitch and they came out perfectly. See for yourself here.

I went walking up the Wicklow mountains in Ireland no too long ago and up to a high point called Djouce which offers a view over the rolling hills south of Dublin. As an experiment, I shot 8 frames while rotating my head about the scene (camera to eye as per normal). I wanted to see if the Crete photos were a fluke as the panoramas from there were composed of, at most, 3 frames each (sometimes 2).

Conclusion
What can I say? I plugged 8 frames into AutoStitch and after a bit of time processing the images, it produced a perfect panorama with no ghosting I could see in the overlap reasons. I like software like that. It may only do one thing but it does that one thing very well.

Give AutoStitch a try. It's free and, so far, it produces the best panoramic results of all the panorama/stitching software I've tried.

One thing to remember when taking panoramas is that the exposures of each frame should be the same. So if you make your first exposure at f/8 and 1/125 of a second, take them all using those settings. Yes, you will have to put your camera into manual mode. Otherwise, you run the risk of having radically different exposures for your images. For example, if you're panning over a landscape that contains water, like a lake, any sunlight reflected off the water may make your camera take a shorter exposure than for the other frames in your sequence. Setting your camera to manual mode will prevent that.

Gary Nugent is a software engineer by profession and has been in the business for over 20 years. Photography has been a hobby for an even longer period of time and he's now even more passionate about it since making the switch to using a digital SLR camera. He runs the Great Landscape Photography website: http://www.great-landscape-photography.com

Martin D18 Guitars Reviewed

Martin D18 guitars can run well over $2000, though you can find a few deals online that take the price, with case, down to a low $1799. Keep in mind, though, that if you need it right away, your express order could add as much as $100 to the cost of the instrument.

What makes Martin d18 guitars such high priced musical instruments? Let's take a look.

Constructed of mahogany blocks, and dovetailed neck joints, Martin d18 string guitars have a D-14 Fred body size. With a top made of solid Sitka spruce, and 5/16 inch top braces that have no scallop, the Martin D18 has sides and back made of genuine and solid mahogany.

The Martin D18, end piece is black boltaron, as is its binding. The style of the top inlay is black and white alternating, of boltaron. There is no back or side inlay with D18 guitars. The nut material is white corian.

D18 guitars have a scale length of 24.4 inches, and the fingerboard position inlays are style 28. The back and side finish is polished gloss with a stain of maple and a dark filler. The belly style bridge is solid rosewood from East India.

Martin D18's have saddles with a radius of sixteen inches, compensates, and made of which Micarta. Their bridge and endpins are black, with dots of white, and the pick guards are black. The case for the Martin D18 instrument is 640 molded, with a hard shell. Optional offers include electronics.

Left handed models of D18 guitars are available for no additional cost. Handcrafted in Pennsylvania, Martin D18 guitars come with a lifetime limited warranty.

Steve Morgan makes it quick and easy to find the best guitars Read expert information here.