Congratulations to Rajesh Jyothiswaran of Murphy, TX,  the winner of the Flickr Photo of the Week contest. This is the second time Rajesh has grabbed the Flickr gold. His first win was in January. He follows last week’s winner, Darren Plank of Cathlamet, WA.

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.

Winner of the Flickr Photo of the Week contest, Rajesh Jyothiswaran.

Now here’s more from Rajesh.

Title of photo: Fort Griffin

Equipment: I currently shoot with Sony a7Rii and Sony SLT-A99V cameras. This particular picture was taken with the Sony a7Rii using a Zeiss Batis 18mm f/2.8 lens.

More about the photo: Fort Griffin, now a Texas State Historic Site, was a US Cavalry fort established in1867 by four companies of the Sixth Cavalry, U.S. Army. The ruins in the picture are that of the administration building of the fort near Albany west of Fort Worth.

This site has some of the darkest skies closest to the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. While I have photographed the Milky Way Panorama before, it was during the summer months and with the Milky Way high in the sky the foreground element was not as prominent. This early in the year, the Milky Way arch is quite low on the horizon and it only took a relatively small number of tightly overlapping vertical shots (10 exposures) which were stitched in Adobe Lightroom to create this image.

During this shoot, Instead of the traditional light painting methods, I used a technique called Low Level Landscape Lighting (LLL or LLLL) which utilizes very low intensity LED lights to illuminate the foreground. The intent is to try and match the starlight to provide depth and presence for the foreground elements. For this image, I had one LED panel on a tripod to my right and a second LED panel dimmed down was set facing down in the inside left-hand corner of the structure.