Congratulations to Shantel Rich of Arlington, winner of the Flickr Photo of the Week contest. This is the second time Shantel has won our contest: her last win came in Nov. 2013. She follows last week’s winner Aamir Muhammad Naeem of Doha, Qata.

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 Tuesday to Monday, and the Art&Seek staff will pick a winner on Friday 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 Tuesday.

Now here’s more from Shantel.

Title of photo: A Lone Star

Equipment: Canon 5D Mark iii, 50mm 1.4 lens, 2 extension tubes

Tell us more about your photo: Any time it snows here in Texas I get goosebumps from being excited to photograph it since it happens so rarely here. Good snow with nicely formed dendrite flakes is even more rare as the temps have to be just right.

I shot this for my Project 52 photography project that I’m doing this year. Our limit is we can only use a 50mm prime lens, so getting a close up macro shot of a snow flake can be a little challenging with equipment limitations. Not to be deterred, I threw a couple of extension tubes on the lens so I could get nice and close and grabbed a feather duster and headed for the backyard.

We had actual dendrite flakes for only about 10 minutes. The rest of the day it was just sleet or bits and pieces of snow as the temperature changed. I counted myself lucky to get one good one, although I spent the day going in and out of the house hoping to see more.