Congratulations to Claudio Branch, this week’s winner of our Flickr Photo contest! This is Claudio’s first win, and he follows last week’s first-time winner, Anna Dykema.

If you would like to participate in the Flickr Photo of the Week contest, all you need to do is upload your photo to our Flickr group page. It’s fine to submit a photo you took earlier than 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 a 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.

Just in time for Halloween: Claudio’s photographs of various interior spaces in the Will Rogers Memorial Coliseum in Fort Worth can make them look like a torture chamber from a Saw film or a spaceship interior from Alien.  Below, he explains the HDR process that gets that disturbing, low-light-but-hyper-crystalline look in which every dust particle seems to be crisply detailed — and is just waiting for something unpleasant to erupt.

Name: Claudio Branch

Title of photo: The Interrogation Suite

Equipment used: It was shot shot with a Nikon D40 using an 18-55 mm lens.

Tell us more about the photo: The image was created using HDR or high-dynamic range techniques. It was created by combining the light from 10 individual exposures. The result is an image with a lot of detail in the highlights and shadows. The weird level of detail is achieved by exaggerated sharpening of focal points while softening regions with strong light sources.

I call my style “game engine expressionism.” I try to combine elements from photography, painting, and 3D rendering into a unique hybrid. “The Interrogation Suite” is a perfect example of this. The image is intended to evoke a sense of apprehension or perhaps even dread. I feel that the cramped dirty space with harsh lighting and an old scratched-up door really sets up the scene for the viewers’ imagination to finish the story for themselves.

You can see more of Claudio’s work here.