Congratulations to Joe Andrews of Denton, the winner of the Flickr Photo of the Week contest! Joe has won our contest before; his last victory came in September of 2010. He follows last week’s winner, Samarpita Sengupta.

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.

Now, here’s more from Joe:

Title of photo: Croy Retreat House
Equipment: Nikon D5100 w/ Nikon 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G ED AF-S DX
Tell us more about your photo: I took this on a recent trip to the Hill Country. The house pictured here is perched on a hill overlooking the Frio River on the Big Springs Ranch for Children in Leakey. I have been fortunate to visit this retreat  once or twice a year over the past few years. It’s the one place I look forward to going and is truly one of the most peaceful places I have ever been. The house serves as a retreat for guests and alumni from both the Big Springs Ranch for Children and the Hill Country Youth Ranch in Ingram. I set this shot up around midnight just below the house pointing south east. The image seen here is a result of 300 stacked images taken over a two hour time frame. All shots were taken at 18mm, f/5, ISO 800, with an eight-second exposure and a 15-second delay between exposures. The stacking and some minimal post processing was done in Photoshop. You can read more about the Big Springs Ranch and HCYR here: http://www.youth-ranch.org/tworanches.htm