Portrait on a rainy day

What else is a greyhound supposed to do on these rainy pre-summer days?
----------

It's the dawn of summer here in South Florida -- which means all-day steady rains mixed with some lightning and thunder here and there and 30-minute power outages.

A perfect day for us retired guys to just hang out in front of the TV and watch for the torrential rain to slow to a drizzle so you can get your energetic hound outside for couple minutes and a little relief.

This is the first time I've endured this kind of day since Dusty became part of my home in November. She's handling it like a champ. I've been able to get her outside for a couple of minutes twice today, and she took advantage of her opportunity both times. I guess I should relax a little. She seems less nervous about having to get outside to take care of business than I am. In the meantime, she's doing what greyhounds do best in idle hours -- snoozing the day away.

Our dedicated DHL driver did show up on today with an anticipated package. Seven days ago, I got the idea to have Canvas Champ convert a few of my favorite pictures of Dusty into a display for a bare wall in my rearranged living room. I have heard radio ads for this company for years, and it also has been a longtime affiliate advertiser for my various websites.

I settled on a plan to do four or five photos and an arrangement of instead one giant print or a collage. But because I had never seen one of Canvas Champ's products, I decided to start with ordering one canvas print and check out the quality and the service before committing to a big investment.

Canvas print's temporary home
----------

I chose to start with the impromptu portrait of Dusty and me shot in December by Larry Warsh Photography, and I navigated to canvaschamp.com to start the process. I opened the original jpeg copy of the portrait that Larry had provided me, cropped it to my liking and calculated a custom sizing for my print of 24"x18" (Canvas Champ measurements go vertical-by-horizontal).

The ordering process was quite intuitive. I did figure out, though, that I needed to convert my jpeg file to a bmp, easily done with Paint, the native Windows 10 program. Without going into technical detail, a bmp file can be enlarged infinitely without degrading the image. I uploaded the bmp file to Canvas Champ via the ordering process, and I was on my way.

I did add a lamination process to my order, the only add-on I bought. Final bill with shipping was $43, which I thought was completely reasonable. The print arrived today, exactly a week after I placed the order. It was well-packaged -- took awhile to unbox it. And it came out perfect. No degradation in the photo, it's cropped and centered perfectly -- I have nothing to criticize about it. 

A successful experiment. Next step now is to pick out two or three more photos, design a custom arrangement and start the process again. I'll let you know how the final project turns out.