Our 18th Featured Picniker is Nagehan Berre Erkılıç, a university student in İstanbul, Turkiye. Nagehan had a difficult childhood and from the age of 7, she and her brother lived with her grandparents. Growing up in a rural area of Turkiye, she focused on her painting, viewing the white pages as a space onto which she could paint the things she had lost. Later, when she passed her university entrance exams, she moved to İstanbul, the cultural center of the country, rich in art and history. She worked as a stand hostess, saleswoman, and private English tutor, and living away from her family for the first time, began to find herself. This let her rekindle her relationship with painting, which then led to her interest in photography. She spent some time doing amateur modeling, which meant she needed a tool to edit her photos. Searching for a good program that’s easy to use and rich in effects, she found Picnik!

A prolific photographer and editor, she has a Facebook fan site devoted to her photography, called Berre’s Creation. Her number one rule in life is to choose a job which really makes you happy, so it won’t feel like a job anymore. Through photography, she found a job she loved, and Picnik made her photography happen. Therefore, she adds, history starts at zero, if the zero is in the right place. And her history started with Picnik.

Picnik: How did you first hear about Picnik, and when was that?
Nagehan: Tuesday, 2 November, 2010, at 7:58 am. It all seems like yesterday! I was surfing the net to find a program to make me feel relaxed and busy with my photos when I saw Picnik’s link. When I first entered [the app], I’ll never forgot that I felt like Alice in Wonderland. Because some of sides of my moods can be bloody, the original reason to stick with Picnik was the Halloween effects. I have never seen such original effects before. So, I spent all my time making scary photos. Then, of course, day by day, I met all the colors and smells of Picnik’s wonderful world. I laid a blanket and started Picniking.
(more…)

The daily routine of those of us on Team Picnik is fairly straightforward. It varies depending on whether it’s a photos meeting day (Wednesdays), afternoon flapjacks day (Tuesday), or the Monday status meeting day (Mondays), but generally we spend all day according to the ebb and flow of email, meetings, and the adorable march of the ZooBorns blog’s baby lemurs, bats, belugas or pygmy hippopotamuses across our Google Readers. So imagine the surprise, delight and excessive use of ALL-CAPS emails to the team when Andrew Bleiman, Co-Founder of ZooBorns, left a comment on the blog a couple of weeks ago to congratulate us and call us (us!) invaluable.

(more…)

Our 16th Featured Picniker is Miki Kwek, a Singaporean TCK currently living in Shanghai. TCK stands for “Third Culture Kid“: kids who spend a significant portion of their childhood in a culture outside of their own, and combines this new culture with their home culture and the cultures of the other TCKs around them to create a distinct third culture. While exciting to belong to such an exclusive group with an opportunity to create friendships that cross social and cultural barriers that most of us would never even encounter in our lives, for many of them it’s also pretty hard. One never really belongs to a place, and rarely knows how to answer when asked, “Where are you from?” On top of that, one’s friends are always leaving. Imagine how important photography can be to someone living this reality.

Leaving behind the sociological theories, however, Miki herself is a funny, thoughtful and talented 11th grader who, depending on what she feels called to do after college, wants either to become a lawyer working for women’s rights or else work with her church. She lives with her parents and younger sister, spends her time on (of course!) photography, reading, writing, history, music (she doesn’t just listen to music, but makes music with the guys in her youth group). Her Flickr Stream is full of light, color and smiling faces. The quality of her photography, and the awesomeness of her Picniking, has absolutely gotten better over time, as well. And since she was so awesome to begin with, we thought she’d make a perfect Featured Picniker!

(more…)

Our fifteenth Featured Picniker is Brandi Fitzgerald. A native of sunny Boca Raton, Florida, Brandi moved away from home when she was 19, following love and opportunity around the country to Tennessee, North Carolina, and Southern California where for four years she built a successful career in corporate payroll. Then in 2007, she followed her love and dreams to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania!

Brandi calls herself a “craftepreneur,” a mix between crafter, artist, photographer and businesswoman. She owns and manages a gallery inside The Piazza at 2nd and Hancock Streets, she teaches classes on digital organization and basic photo editing, she does custom scrapbooks, refinishes and repurposes household furniture and housewares and in her free time still enjoys taking pictures and being crafty! She loves her family, travel, roller skating, board games and cheese. She’s found that with growth and exploration come setbacks and mistakes, but has also found that that’s what life is all about, and that living in the moment, learning from every experience is what makes life so wonderful. And it brought her to Philly, which she loves.

But yes, she misses the ocean.

(more…)

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!

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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!

(more…)

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!

(more…)

Vancouver-area high school student Stacy Leson is our tenth Featured Picniker. Currently in grade 10, her Facebook albums are full of swim meets, frisbee games, and IHOP. Mostly swim meets, though, and lots of medal shots of her on top of podiums. Another Picniker carrying on the tradition of living in way more interesting places than most of us will ever visit, she was born in Calgary, Alberta, and has lived in Texas and Indonesia.

She tells us that she’s looking forward to taking a photography elective next semester, which means that she’s this good a photographer without ever taking a class. Indeed, her Flickr stream dates only as far back as September, yet still manages to reveal a wonderful eye for composition and color, and her use of Picnik has left the Picnik offices in consensus that she’s way deep for her age.

(more…)

Our ninth Featured Picniker was discovered in our Flickr group, where his vivid, lavishly textured photos of street scenes in some unknown European capital quickly caught our eye. It turned out he’s Robert Kruyskamp, in Den Haag (The Hague), seat of the government of the Netherlands, home of the Dutch monarch, location of the International Criminal Court, center for all foreign embassies and government industries in the country, Europol, and the Escher Museum. Not a bad place to have a camera in!

Currently working in the hospitality industry, Robert describes himself as “Caffeinated Shooter,” and his Twitter feed is full of reports of shooting assignments, espresso drinks, and trying to get some sleep.

(more…)