Congratulations to Thorpe Griner of Denton, the winner of the Flickr Photo of the Week contest! This appropriately spooky entry marks Thorpe’s first win; he follows last week’s winner, Claudio Branch.

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.

Name: Thorpe Griner

Title of photo: This Old Opera House

Equipment used: Canon 7D w/ Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 lens

Tell us more about the photo: My photo was taken on the downtown square of Denton. The old Opera House is now occupied by Recycled Books & CD’s. I’ve always loved the look of this old building and wanted to capture it in a way never seen before. On a recent solo photowalk, I looked up to see the storm clouds just starting to break up and knew it would make an interesting photo. The image was processed in Adobe Lightroom 3 in high contrast black & white tones to give it a more dramatic look. I feel editing a photo in an interesting style is only part of the process, because you must start out with a good photo to begin with. As soon as I saw this photo on my camera’s LCD screen, I immediately liked it and envisioned what you see in the final product.