Vicki Dvorak, blogger, children’s art instructor, mother, and photographer is our 18th Featured Picniker. Vicki grew up with a father working in Forestry and Agriculture, which meant she spent her childhood moving around the Western States (California, Colorado, and Washington), and using her own creativity to entertain herself: making her own doll houses, doll clothes, collages, sketching and painting and never being bored because, with her creative mind, she always had something to do.

Vicki took this creative streak (and inability to sit quietly behind a desk) and put it to work studying Recreation Leadership after high school and working as a children’s recreation leader, camp director and preschool art instructor. Since then, she’s gotten married, had three children, and as her kids have gotten older has been so excited to discover a new creative outlet: photography!

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Late June. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and the vuvuzelas can be heard around the globe.

All you soccer fans whose teams have made it through to the second stage: Redouble your efforts to cheer your country further and further into the tournament! Make sure the world sees your support by tagging your fan photos with picnikfanphoto to get them onto the Picasa Web Album fan gallery below! Flickr Picnikers can use the same tag to show off their team spirit in this Flickr slideshow.

Have fun, good luck, and happy Picniking!

Brenda, our Community Liaison in Charge of Flickr Operations, has started a contest in our Flickr Picnikers group for everyone to look back through their Picniked photos from 2009 and submit the one they think is their best. And instead of the usual contest, three entries will be picked at random for a free month of Picnik Premium!

Have a look at the entries, and to enter your own best of 2009 Picniked photo, set up a Flickr account and join the Flickr Picnikers group!

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and we’ve brought back some great Effects and Stickers to help you take part and support the cause.

Add the Go Pink! and Frame it Pink Effects or add a pink ribbon Sticker to the photos you share.  Make your voice heard by tweeting your Pink-ified photos, showing them off on Facebook, emailing them out to friends, or adding them to the Picnikers group on Flickr.

Join us in spreading the word about early detection, prevention, and a cure.

Our 14th Featured Picniker is Trevor Reed, head foreman of a three-bay truck wash and detail facility of the largest trucking company in Idaho, aka (in Picnik World Headquarters) “Trucker Dude”. Living in Idaho Falls, Idaho, Trevor grew up in nearby Shelley, Idaho after moving away from the Mt Saint Helens area of Washington as a kid. He’s been working for the same trucking company for 12 years, he was in his high school band, still plays the drums when he gets a chance, and writes science fiction.

We here at Picnik HQ have actually been following his Flickr stream for months, where his photographs of gleaming 18-wheelers, incredibly dirty faces, and wide, “Tatterland” vistas certainly stood out in our Flickr Picnikers group. A lot of his photos are of big trucks with Vibrance effects, but sometimes a little baby in Black & White and Vignette. You get the tough guys looking rugged and mean with HDR-ish over top, but also the tough guys hamming it up with Gooify and Orton-ish. Each picture stands out and it’s obvious that “Trucker Dude” enjoyed taking every one of them. Plus, they actually are really good photographs: well-composed, well-set up, well-lit, well-edited, and each has a personality, tells a story, and actually is worth a thousand words. So we couldn’t wait to get in touch and make him our 14th Featured Picniker!

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KrisD, our 13th Featured Picniker, is the second professional photographer using Picnik for her business! She lives in Belmont Heights, in Long Beach, with her husband and four-year-old daughter. She’s always been into the arts, and studied art, landscaping, and architecture at various colleges in Southen California, including Cal Poly Pomona and Santa Barbara City. She’s been drawing and painting since her childhood, but finds that since having her daughter she uses her photography as her canvas and editing tools (and Picnik!) as her media.

This background in fine art has definitely informed her photography, as she considers herself more of a photographic artist than a photographer since her real passion finds its expression in tuning her images with artistic effects, which is readily evident perusing her Flickr photostream. Collage, Cinemascope, Cross Process, and a fair amount of Reala 400 (a preset Curves effect in the Advanced section of Create), each one of her photographs is exquisitely turned out, whether brides, expectant mothers, children, or chihuahuas in shades. And all this using Picnik, and for her business as well! We were all so impressed we just had to pick her for our lucky 13th Featured Picniker.

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Picnik’s SXSW team Peter (The Designer), Michael (The Other Designer), Mike (COO), and Jonathan (CEO) are thrilled to congratulate our friends at Flickr for winning in the Classic category at the 12th Annual South by Southwest Interactive Web Awards! As their partner photo editor, we’re proud to be part of their award-winning functionality, interactivity, and, of course, creativity!

Picnik’s SXSW team have been having a grand old time in Austin this weekend, and are looking forward to two more thrilling days of keynotes, panel discussions, and margaritas, buoyed by having been nominated in the same category as our friends at Flickr. All of us at Picnik want to thank all of you wonderful Picnikers who supported us, and we can’t wait till the guys get back to Seattle with all the learning, inspiration, and hangover cures they’ve picked up this week!

The March contest theme has been announced by Brenda, our Community Liaison in Charge of Flickr Operations and Antipodean Branch Office Manager, and this month it’s: Scrapbook!

Using any of Picnik’s tools and features, perhaps starting with collage and then adding stickers and text, or starting with a photo, adding a frame, and layering on top of it, and then adding stickers and text, you can enter up to 3 scrapbooked creations, and the winner wins a full year of Picnik Premium!

Also, congratulations to last month’s winners of the theme “Be Mine <3"! And a special congratulations to Wendy * Darling for tying herself for first place! She therefore wins not one but two years of Picnik Premium! I’m sure she’s very popular this week…

Runners-up [[TiGER.} and brownie.bacon both win free 3-month subscriptions for their submissions as well! A slideshow of all last month’s entries can be seen here.

Our twelfth Featured Picniker is Japanese native Hideki Okuno, who lives in Toyama Prefecture on the Japan Sea coast, he lives with his wife and eight-year-old son. A music fan, he studied to be a recording engineer and worked briefly in a recording studio where working on Macintoshes led him onto his current career. When he was 20 and living in Tokyo, he moved to Toyama and got married, traveling to Switzerland on his honeymoon. Today he works as a systems engineer and besides music and building models with his son, he of course enjoys photography!

With a regular procedure to his photos of importing his Raw files into iPhoto, using Canon Digital Professional to adjust white balance where needed and convert to jpegs, then uploading the jpegs into Picnik, editing, and saving directly from Picnik into Flickr, his Flickr stream, and activity in the Flickr Picnikers group, is constantly updated with pictures of his family, landscapes, flowers and plants, toys, animals, and the occasional bottle of whiskey. And yet he feels that he is only beginning to learn about photography, composition and exposure, and that portraits, landscapes, macro, B&W and abstracts, he wants to learn all of them. So of course, such a talented Picniker and enthusiastic learner is an ideal choice for our twelfth Featured Picniker!

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CJ Wheeler loves horses, but her relationship with them has not always been a happy one. When she was thirteen, she fell from her spooked horse and fractured her skull. She missed a whole year of school to recover from the injuries and couldn’t bring herself to go near a horse for 30 years. But then, with a successful career in radio as the Executive Producer for the Rick Roberts Show in San Diego, she and her husband bought a ranch, complete with empty horse stalls, and she decided it was finally time to overcome her fear of horses. Now along with their cat and two dogs, they have three horses: Tango, Cash and Sasha.

Now using photography to make up for those 30 years without horses in her life, CJ got a new camera for her birthday last year and scoured the internet for a photo editor to use when she found Picnik. And it’s because of Picnik that she’s now started a photography business. Writing in to us only this October to ask how we choose our Featured Picnikers, our Feedbackers introduced her to Flickr, where the success of the striking and dramatic Picniked pictures of her animals inspired her to sell her photos professionally. In just that short amount of time, CJ has already been published in two magazines, will soon be a featured artist at a local Wine and Art festival and sells prints through several local stores. Such an impressive and uplifting story surely needs to be told for our eleventh Featured Picniker!

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