Hi Moshe,

Welcome aboard. I am going to address two different things in this post.

The first is about embedding images. I tried - several times - to figure out a way to embed your images into a post. For whatever reason, photo.net does not seem to allow it to happen. Typically images are posted in this fashion:

(Make sure you add the front bracket...I did this only so that the wording would show).

image]http://www.YourWebDomain.com/path/FileName.jpg[/image]

Do you have hosting through photo.net? Or are these just images embedded in an already existing post?

Part II:

About backgrounds - you are right...this is extremely difficult to do. 90% of my work that I do in pet photography is done 'on location.' I prefer the control of lights and backgrounds because of this.

I do very little in parks or other open places. I agree that Julie's use of crop is a very valuable tool. The difficulty is when you want to blow up images to large sizes.

I think that the other alternative is to use lenses with long reach. The idea being that if you cannot always crop later to do it in advance. Specifically, I am talking about reducing the elements in a scene that you are photographing.

If you are doing work with people, and they are aware that you are doing photographic work, then getting them to pose with you a bit is also helpful. In this case, using buildings or other such materials as backdrops may be valuable.
Cheers
James