TRICKS I'VE LEARNED In creating a pond design digitally, you first need a digital photo of the area (5 Mega pixels min.) Next load it into your digital imaging program. Now you are ready. Many graphic or photo software programs such as PhotoShop and Microsoft's Digital Image Pro, will let you manipulate an object.

For example, each individual object that is dragged to the work space is surrounded by a "bounding" box with nodes on the sides and corners of the box. By clicking on a corner node and holding down the mouse, you can drag the corner to make the object larger or smaller. By clicking on the side node you can make the object in the box fatter or taller.

With this feature alone you can totally disguise any object, be it a rock or plant, by changing its dimensions. Just by dragging a rock to the work space, copying and pasting it several times, you can change the shape of each copy of the original object. Not only can you make the rock wider, taller, flatter, larger, or smaller, you can also warp the shape, change the color, shade it or tint it.

So with only a handful of rocks on the work space, you could create a veritable rock quarry! By dragging the nodes in a section of pond water, you can make the water fit any size pond by stretching or narrowing it. Need a couple more weirs in your waterfalls? A few more plants in the pond? A cat, a tree, a rock, bench, gazebo, bridge, stream? Just click and drag & paste, it's that simple.

Right after seeing the virtual photograph of his back yard, a homeowner exclaimed, "Let's do it." Not, how much will it cost, just "Let's do it." Another client joked, "Wow, this is so beautiful, I think instead of you building the waterfall, I'll just have this enlarged and pasted on our living room window!"

Not only do I charge $350 per pond design photo, I recently increased my construction prices by 30 percent. And since implementing digital pond designs in my bids, my closing ratio on signed contracts has soared from 60% to 80%.

Eight out of ten proposals/contracts come back signed with a deposit check enclosed. Not to mention an additional $350.00 value added, for a digital pond design. Let's face it: people like to see what they are getting before they hand over their hard earned money.

MAKING THE SALE If you are a contractor or pond builder, constructing ponds and waterfalls for a living, you must ask yourself, "Do I want to increase my income by 15 to 20 percent? If the answer is yes, then you need to start providing your clients with a digital pond design. When I meet with my client for the first time to survey their yard, I ask several important questions:

1. Where do you spend most of your time when you are inside the house? Ninety percent of the time the answer is, the living room.

2. Where do you spend most of your time when you are outside? That answer is usually the patio.

By establishing these facts up front, you can explain that the waterfall and pond location needs to be nearby the place where they spend the majority of their time. For example, outside the living room window or slider and near the patio. If their waterfall and pond are located in the back corner of their property, the only time they will enjoy it is if they make an effort to go out to where it is. Once these issues are settled you now know where to take the picture. It is best to do a pond design in the place where it will end up being built.

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