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.

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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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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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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.

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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.

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16-year-old Chase Barrington, our eighth Featured Picniker, dwells in Kansas but keeps her heart is in Texas. Her three passions in life are singing, writing, and photography, and she plans on returning to Texas to study digital art in college. Using her writing and music as an inspiration for her photos and vice versa, being home-schooled and possessing a strong faith has given her extra time, and devotion, to focus on her art.

Three years ago she got her digital SLR for Christmas when her parents noticed her constant use of the family point-and-shoot, and a year ago she started uploading photos to Flickr. With a photostream of an unusual level of polish, Chase’s photos are all exquisitely colored (or black and white), carefully posed, and all have some sort of poetic, meaningful title or caption attached to them.

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Carie Bauer, our seventh Featured Picniker, moved out of Kentucky looking for a place with amazing outdoors scenery with both mountains and ocean, but also with a thriving urban center that is both progressive and creative. So obviously she ended up in the Pacific Northwest, home as well to Picnik World Headquarters. A keen traveler, Carie has a photo stream on Flickr full of pictures of Mexico and the American Southwest, and would love to backpack across Europe and Latin America, and to visit Australia, Ireland and India, and travel through Japan, Prague, and Iceland. And maybe someday also Vietnam, Italy, Spain, Ethiopia and Dubai.

Arriving in Portland a few years ago to get her Master’s degree in Public Administration, Carie has focused her career on the nonprofit and public sector world, working with volunteers and interns in agencies primarily devoted to victims of crime and domestic violence. Keenly interested in leadership, advocacy, public policy design and civic engagement issues, Carie also volunteers herself at a local nonprofit agency where she offers her experience in program development to help begin a leadership academy for Latino youth.

Unless someday she decides to chuck it all in for a job working at Lonely Planet.

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Since graduating from university and chucking in his 4-month European backpacking tour for 20 years in Japan, our sixth Featured Picniker has devoted himself to art, short film-making, nurturing relationships with the people he meets in his profession, and the varied and rewarding aspects of life that come with marriage and fatherhood. Paul Carr, native to Birmingham, England, has lived in Sataima, Japan, teaching high school English and developing his interests in multimedia and computer based education through his ESL video blog, and collecting a wife and child along the way. Recently, though, all that came to an end: One day last spring, perusing BBC online’s Webscape program, Paul discovered Picnik.

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