Bacon: The Danger Is Real!

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KING Of Ernest Hemingway's House

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At Ernest Hemingway's house in Key West they have over 30 of his cat's descendants roaming around the grounds. If you like cats like I do, I'd make a point to go visit even if it's just to see the cats! The reason I'm even posting this picture is not because I'm into Ernest Hemingway but because cats are cool! Case in point the above picture... I took this shot in Ernest Hemingway's bedroom during a tour. No I wasn't part of the tour because I wasn't interested. I was merely passing through when this cat jumped on the roped off bed as if to say what are you going to do about it. I love that attitude in cats!This cat obviously knew that this was his owners house therefore he was going to sit in the middle of his owners bed like he was king of the house! Does this sound like way your cat behaves? I know Queen and mascot of this blog is no exception.

Photo Of The Day: Sunny Night

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Sometimes it's fun to imagine, sometimes it's fun to tweak with photos. Obviously, I tweaked this photo to make it look like the sun was out in the black of night. Although we do forget, being tiny specks that we are on a tiny speck in the spiral arm of the Milky Way, that the sun is in the blackness of space. We just don't see it that way because we are bound to the Earth...well obviously. While we are speaking of the Sun, a great movie about the Sun if you haven't seen it is Sunshine.

Photo Of The Day: Cat In A Hat

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Storm Trooper Sheba Reporting For Duty

There Really Is An App For That: Instagram

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First and foremost, happy 4th to everyone! I thought the first picture was appropriate for the occasion, in order to show off another cool app that I discovered. It's called Instagram and it's of course on the iPhone. Another great thing that you'll be happy to hear is that it's completely free meaning there's not even any ads and that's sometimes rare.

What is Instagram? Obviously it's a picture app but it's also so much more in that it's a photo sharing app.  What's great about this, is that you can apply 16 awesomely cool special effect filters to any photo you choose from your phone's library or a photo that you take, then share them on an Instagram social network, Twitter, or Facebook.

The following is just a few examples of the special effect filters that you can take advantage of with before and after examples:

Before

After Instagram applied

Before

Photo Of The Day: Fishing Tiny

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Ahh, the life of solitude aboard a tiny vessel.

On a very nice morning recently, I was walking to my car to go get a much needed hair cut, something caught my eye in a nearby pond. It might not look like much from the picture but there are two good ol' boys fishing in a tiny boat. Like, I said, it might not look like much but this is a pond we are talking about and nobody but ducks are seen on these small waters 99% of the time.

They look like they might be brothers so I admire that. I digress, I wish I could of gone out on the pond and asked them if they caught anything. Even if they didn't, I guess it still would be a relaxing way to spend a quite morning. Hey, if someone said, you can either go to work today or go fishing on a tiny boat in little residential pond, I'd say sign me up for the boat.

Photo Of The Day: Sunset Story

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Love how this gives the illusion that I was taking a picture of the Sun above the cloud top as if on a mountain peak

The Sun starts it's inevitable fade into the clouds

Love the Mirage effect

House Too Big

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Yes, it is hard to spot the woman on the porch of this GARGANTUAN house that we spotted while vacationing in Texas but we thought we'd help you out. I wonder if she is thinking, "Oh man, geez did I really need a house this big". It sure looks like it.

Ugly Texas Creepy Crawlies

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Just got to say that I'm glad the bug and I were separated by the glass on my patio door. We do have some huge and very rarely sighted bugs in Texas and this was one of them.

The GOOD Life Of Key West Chickens Or Is It?

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On a recent trip to Key West, this fugitive chicken was spotted at a gas station. No, I'm not talking about the man in the photo; he is not a chicken (at least not that I know of). I'm talking about the ACTUAL chicken in the photo.

As you can see from the picture (above) taken at a local restaurant, on an outside patio table there is a sticker that pretty much sums it up. In Key West, life is a little different; they let the chickens roam free to do pretty much what they want so they aren't really fugitives at all but free loving chickens! I guess you could say it's a part of the laid back lifestyle of Key West.

Then… what do you know, what's under the table (above) is really ironic because it's a family of chickens! For some reason, I don't think they like their pictures taken though! I have evidence of this, and you can see for yourself from this series of pictures I took...

As you can see... further evidence....the chickens are trying to hide from the camera!

Then finally the truth is revealed as to why the chickens of Key West were hiding from us. They are trying to avoid ending up in someones "stovepot" as this sign that we spotted at the restuarant  references. 

Foodie Fridays: Rib Sticking Good

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This is world famous Texas BBQ baby, from none other than world renowned Sonny Bryan's in Big D. YeeHaw!

 Why food Fridays? It must be done. Out any day of the week while at work, Friday is probably the day I think about food the most and that's saying a lot because I think about food all the time. Why? I was raised on eating good food. I can't help it, I live in Texas where we have some of the best. It's in my DNA and I'm crazy about food. If you think about food, I think about it more. Ok, and I'm Italian too and we like to eat lots of bad stuff. Still asking? This is my blog and I'm telling you that we're going to have food Fridays. Every Friday we will feature a different food item that sends the good time weekend vibes to our stomachs. There, is that reason enough? ...I thought so. Happy Friday now that I got your weekend started off right and your stomach growling.

Cloud Man

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I'm usually not one to try and pick out shapes in the clouds but I just couldn't help myself with this one. It's very obvious to me that we now have to worry about gladiators in the clouds. I said what the heck, it's nice to have a little imagination and took the shot. 

There Really Is An App For That: Tiny Planet

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Today, while checking out any iPhone photo apps worth downloading, I came across a really interesting one called Tiny Planet. I guess what it does is shrink your images into bit size miniatures of a tiny planet. I tried it out on prairie dog image that I shot awhile back and I got the following result:

Before: Everything is normal in prairie dog world....

After: Until it's flipped upside down

All in all, kind of a fun app to play with it and it's free.

Foodie Fridays: Pizza A La Beautiful

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It tastes as beautiful as it looks.

 It goes without saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. I'm here to say that a really nice looking food shot is worth ten times that because you can eat it.

This pizza that is staring back you was not an easy creation to make. Yes, I did make it myself and it took time, yes lots of sweaty time in the kitchen to make. It was more than worth it because I ate the whole thing myself. Over two days of course. You didn't think I was that much of a pig did you?

One last thing about this beautiful pizza, it's called a Marghertia Pizza and if you haven't tried to make one, it's worth your time and appetite, trust me. Ok, ok, we'll give you the recipe too. Please check out this post on my food blog (yes I have one those too) entitled: A Unique Creation: Margherita Pizza

There Really Is An App For That: HDR For Free

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I have to admit that sometimes I don't take the best photos. The easiest thing to do is to blame it on the fact that it was cloudy that particular day. We've all been there but there's really no excuse when you can easily find an app for that.

I'm pretty sure I found that golden egg of an app; for this particular purpose anyway. To show you what I mean, below is a sampling of shots I took while on vacation. I put these ordinary shots through the app called HDR for Free that I downloaded on my iPhone and posted the result below in the before and after. Also, without getting too technical, for those of you that don't know, HDR stands for High Dynamic Range.

Before: A cloudy day in January in Key Largo. Yes, even Key Largo gets cloudy.



After: Looking at the after result, I almost feel like every cloudy day can be a good day

Before: This was one of the few days that it wasn't cloudy on my vacation but I decided to apply the HDR filter to this anyway to see what the result would be.

After: Looks like it could be from a resort/travel mag. No wonder they have such good shots in those.


Needless to say, there's no doubt that I'll be coming back to this app. I hope I've shown you that there is hope for disappointing and dull cloudy day shots. There's really no excuse anymore. The HDR For Free app is a winner. Yes, it really is free.

Note: These were taken with a low res point and shoot camera 2 years ago. I've upgraded since then to a digital camera that takes better and higher resolution shots. Check them out in the post entitled: As The Ducks Swiw In
More about about my newer camera in future posts.

Negative Slides From The Past: So Bad It's Good

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This is meant to be so bad it's good. I did the best for what I was working with. In other words, this image is ancient and taken with an ancient camera even for the time it was taken. If you haven't guessed by now, this a picture of the much younger Sheba (see post entitled Introducing The Queen) back in 1995 when I lived in Panama Central America.

I took photography in high school back then and played around with the camera at home. Nothing much to look at but this is what rookie photographers do with a manual 35mm Pentax Camera. Also, as an extra hurdle, the film was developed in a dark room by yours truly. No, I take that back. This picture was never developed. It came straight from the spool. I lifted it off the negative not too long ago using an old HP Scanner Jet that included a negative slide scanner.  I don't even know if you can find a scanner that has that feature on it these days.

Now, you know why it looks so bad. Which it does but hey it was never meant to be good. Stay tuned for more negative slides from the past because after all this blog is part photography blog part humor. Maybe the next negative slide will be better.

A Title Change: Same Crap Different Word

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After much deliberation I've decided to change one letter of my blog to the letter G. That means we're now Smidgen Goop instead of Smidgen Poop. Why the change you might ask? My better senses told me that Poop might be too strong of a word for a blog title. I was basically calling my blog crap and I'm still calling my blog crap but it sounds better now.

For any of you that might have a blog and decided to change the title, it's not very fun. You have to go back and change a lot such as the banner, links, etc. I hope it was worth it. Tell me what you think. Do you like the change or should I of kept it Poop instead of Goop? Comment below and please join my blog if you approve and even if you don't. Oh, in honor of my old blog title, here is a image to remember those few short days when we were Poop...........................

The Story Of A Queen

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This fancy rug is very appropriate for a queen of her stature as evidenced by how well she blends into it

 This wouldn't be a Smidgen Goop worthy blog if we didn't introduce to you the queen of our household. At least that's what she thinks. You might not know it from looking at her but she's been alive since 1994.
It's a long story but we'll make it short. She's a jungle cat. Yes, she really did come from the jungle. You see, back in the early to mid 90's I lived in Panama Central America. We had a house there and behind our house was a jungle. One day, this stray cat appeared from the jungle. After a couple of days, we decided to capture her and take her in since it was apparent that she didn't have a home.

This was not an easy task because we had to put tuna in a carrier on our porch and wait for her to go inside to eat so we could close the door on her. She'd always hear us coming from a mile away and would scurry out of the cat carrier before we got close. She continued to push her luck though and it eventually ran out. About a week after we first started trying, we quietly snuck around the corner and locked her in before she could escape. Finally, we could give her a name that's how came to be known as Sheba. It's no wonder she thinks she's a queen. Now, she becomes the mascot of Smidgen Goop so stay tuned for more photos and stories about Sheba because we've only really scratched the surface of this wild and not to mention crazy feline.

Dinnertime Ducks

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Full stream ahead, dinner is served or is it?

On a recent walk, a mother load of ducks were spotted. Then they spotted us. You may of been in one of these situations before. It's called, ducks automatically presume you have food to offer them. This is probably expected because people usually bring bread when they walk around a pond or lake so they can feed the ducks.



The ducks are eyeing us to see if we have a feast to offer



And...off into the sunset we go

 As it turns out, sadly we had nothing to offer the ducks and they swam into the sunset. I'm pretty sure they were disappointed so next time we better think about making it up to them. Sorry ducks, we got you next time.