Congratulations to Jared Eckstein of Grand Prairie, the winner of the Flickr Photo of the Week contest. It’s a big week for Jared, as he joins the very exclusive triple-winners club. The other three-time champs are Sarah Philipson and Jacob Rasmussen. Who will be the first to claim four titles? Be sure to check out Jared’s new photography Web site, as well as his other Flickr winners here and here. He follows last week’s winner, Bill Miles.

If you would like to participate in the Flickr Photo of the Week contest, all you need to do is upload your photo to to our Flickr group page. It’s fine to submit a photo you took previous to the current week, but we are hoping that the contest will inspire you to go out and shoot something fantastic this week to share with Art&Seek users. If the picture you take involves another facet of the arts, even better. The contest week will run from Monday to Sunday, and the Art&Seek staff will pick a winner on Monday afternoon. We’ll notify the winner through FlickrMail (so be sure to check those inboxes) and ask you to fill out a short survey to tell us a little more about yourself and the photo you took. We’ll post the winners’ photo on Wednesday.

Now, more from Jared:

Jared Eckstein

Title of photo: Walk Through the Park

Equipment: Voigtländer Bessa R2C with “Soviet fake” Carl Zeiss Jena 50mm f/2.0 (Yellow-Green filter attached) and Iflord XP-2 Super 400 film.

Tell us more about your photo: I remember walking through this path as a child with its thick canopy of crepe myrtles. It felt like a mysterious thicket in the Black Forest to a 4-foot-tall child, and I wanted to relive that.

This was shot with my belly to the dirt, widest aperture possible for the Soviet glory and selective focus, a little underexposure to push the shadows darker, and a filter to push up the contrast. Taking a lesson from my 4-year-old self, I figured a little dirt never hurt. I should act like a kid with a camera more often.