Congratulations to Robert W. Howington, the winner of our Flickr Photo of the Week contest! Robert follows last week’s winner, Steve Lofton. More from Robert in a minute. First, a cool new application for our Flickr Photo winners. There’s a Google maps mashup called streetartlocator.com, which allows users to plot pictures of public art on the map. We noticed that North Texas was pretty sparsely populated, so Robert’s image is now on the site. When our winners feature a public piece of art, I’ll continue to add them to the site. Here’s the link to Robert’s image.

If you would like to participate, 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 Robert:

Robert W. Howington
Title: Man With Briefcase
Equipment: Nikon D50, ISO 200, f11 @ 1/500
Tell us more about your photo: While walking to The Pour House in downtown Fort Worth’s Sundance Square entertainment area to eat lunch with a couple of ladies from work, I stopped and shot Man With Briefcase, a piece of god awful “art” located at Fort Worth’s Burk Burnett Park
For this shot I used Capture NX to get the black and white effect and then messed around with it more using the Nik’s Color Efex Pro 2.0 plug-in for Capture NX to give it even more zing.
I think the Man With Briefcase is hideous, and so I guess this is my rendition of its hideousness, at least to my eyes and, in fact, I think what I’ve done to Man With Briefcase makes him look better than the real thing, which is nothing less than an eyesore brought to us by some of Fort Worth’s “old family money elite” for a million freakin’ bucks.