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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Our fifth Featured Picniker, Andrea W., is a redhead. But she’s worthy of being featured in other ways as well. We first noticed her when she submitted three entries to the Flickr Picnikers contest on Best Use of Text. Intrigued, we poked around in the rest of her photo stream, which was handily divided into Picnik Originals and Picnik!. And there we found picture upon picture of Andrea and her lovely girlfriends, using every Picnik effect imaginable (and a fair bit of text, too!), dressed to the nines and out on the town in Vancouver.

Without needing anymore convincing, when we contacted Andrea we discovered that she’s just weeks away from traveling to Northern Ireland to work on her senior undergrad thesis towards her History Honors degree at Simon Fraser University. She also tidily took our emailed list of questions and put them in a tidy Word Doc for us. Honours student, indeed!

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Our fourth Featured Picniker is Jordan Stubbs, a 15-year old high school student living in central Georgia. With his dad in the air force, Jordan has lived all over the world, including Guam, Australia, and Germany. He’s first chair alto sax in the school band, is an AP student, and a committed Picnik user. Obviously he’s going places.

We first noticed him on Flickr, where his Picnik-tagged photos started quickly piling up. Then we noticed him participating in our Flickr Picnikers group’s contests, and we noticed, “This kid’s really good!” Especially considering his first Picniked photograph was only added to Facebook on May 28. The way he uses the full range of Picnik tools, from the Effects to Text, Shapes, and Frames, demonstrate he can use Picnik based on the needs of an individual photo, creating a body of work that’s incredibly diverse and creative. He also takes the most wonderful photos of his little sister, which just melts our sibling-hearts. The fact that he’s been doing this for such a short time only makes him more worthy of being featured, since he’s walking proof of how easy it is to achieve photo editing awesomeness even for someone without a lot of photography experience using Picnik for the first time. Plus he’s hilarious. Another perfect candidate for Featured Picniker!

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A writer and editor for over a decade, Ariel Meadow Stallings is the author of a book called Offbeat Bride: Taffeta Free Alternatives for Independent Brides, the editor of offbeatbride.com maintains a blog at electrolicious.com, and manages a local semi-regular literary event called Salon of Shame, where Seattlites gather to drink and exploit their younger selves by reading from their worst adolescent writing: middle school diaries, high school poetry, etc.

Originally from Bainbridge Island, Ariel grew up in a log cabin and studied Sociology and Communications at the University of Washington. She has written up and down the Left Coast, crafting articles for San Francisco-based feminist zines and Amazon.com reviews and several things in between. She’s been on The Today Show, she works at Microsoft three days a week taking pictures of cool employees, and she has bright pink hair tips.

Since she’s mostly a casual photographer who does other things for a living, we thought she’d be a great choice for Featured Picniker, to showcase how great casual pictures can look with just one or two Picnik Effects. And because four of us in Team Picnik are getting married this summer (that is, two of us are getting married to another two of us), who better to feature than an offbeat bride?

Picnik: How did you first hear about Picnik, and when was that?
Ariel: Picnik was recommended to me by a friend last fall, but it wasn’t until it was integrated with my beloved Flickr that I really started playing with it.

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Our second Featured Picniker is Vinci Galang, a 24-year-old Filipino living in Makati, one of the cities making up the greater metropolitan area of Manila. He graduated with a degree in computer science, likes video games, anime, art, rock music and Star Wars, and lists his tools of the trade as “Crap Literature and Boring Photography plus Picnik Editing.” His Flickr photostream and Deviant Art gallery are full of portraits which demonstrate a sutble and artful use of Picnik that goes beyond simple photo editing. A perfect candidate, therefore, for our second-ever Featured Picniker!

Picnik: How did you first hear about Picnik, and when was that?
Vinci: When I heard and have read that Flickr have partnered with Picnik to give them an editing function. I have been editing since then!

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Our first Featured Picniker is a nineteen-year-old Canadian student. Katie McDonough came to the attention of Team Picnik late last summer, after we launched on Facebook. The fact that she’s a perfect representation of a Facebook Picniker hadn’t nearly as much to do with it as did the fact that she’s amazingly talented, and was instantly taking the sorts of pictures any other university student has in spades, and using Picnik to create beautiful, lyrical, poetic creations with them.

Because of her talent and because she was using Picnik exactly how some of us dreamed our users would, and because she’s been with us since the beginning of our relationship with Facebook, Katie soon became a sort of icon for us, an archetype for everything a Facebooking Picniker can be, and everything our users can be capable of. So, of course, we had to feature her for our inaugural Featured Picniker post.

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