next*

The sleep-away camp I went to as a kid must have been founded by hippies. The arts were embraced, every meal began and ended in song, and all games of skill ended in a tie. The focus on winning was de-emphasized in favor of the shared experience.

Photogamer is a community of flickr photographers who take a similar approach. Winners? Nah, just playing is reward enough. Photogamer got started last February to chase away the winter shooting doldrums. "Weekend Workshop" maker Bre Pettis and photographer "Brooklyn Hilary" McHone started a flickr group and invited participants to complete photographic-themed challenges and share their results. There are now over 700 Photogamers, who've contributed thousands of images to challenges that range from the relatively basic (take five photos of people/places/things that can be described as: glowing, artsy, moving, and red) to the more complex (create a comic-book narrative with photos, complete with hero, villain, catastrophe, and happy ending). Once, Bre issued a challenge asking members to collaborate on a single image made up of shots from nine different photographers.

Participation in the weekly and (new for 2008!) daily challenges forces you to get creative -- and ultimately take MORE pictures from a fresh perspective. In the first eight days of January I've stretched my skills with following: "Take a picture of: closed eyes, a bucket, a refrigerator, hair, a lightbulb, television, and toes. Upload it to the group. Live the dream." Forget about winning here--it's more fun to see how your fellow photogs interpret each new assignment.

Photogamer leverages twitter and a WordPress-powered blog to get the word out. This is a game that takes social tools seriously (and knows how to use them)!

So give Photogamer a go--you may not get a bravo for a first-place finish and it won't improve your golf game or freshen your breath, but being part of it is reward enough. Photogaming could make you think more creatively and recall fondly those warm summer days back at sleep-away camp where everybody was a winner.

Meatballs photo by mil8. Used with permission.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Last week our friends over at Flickr HQ released two cool new treats for Flickrati. On the same day! Check out the new stats for Pro account holders, and the free new Uploadr 3.0 for one and all. There's a Windows Vista and XP version and one for Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.4. (The older uploader is still supported, as is the web-based upload form.)

If you're a Flickr pro account holder, you can now get full-on Flickr stats for your photos with detailed daily, weekly, and all-time view counts, referrers, and nearly everything else numeric you might want to know about your images and who's looking at them. If you upgrade now to a pro account, 28 days of stats await you. Just give the Flickr folks about 24 hours to get your stats up and running.

And even if you're not in LaughingSquid's league of "millions served" you're bound to discover something unexpected.

The new uploader has even more offline functionality, "plus, for the first time ever, you can reorder your photos before uploading by simply dragging them into place!" And, for folks like me, who manage more than one Flickr account, once you've authorized the uploader to access your accounts, the new tool is just as easy as the old one for switching between multiple accounts.

Finally, if you've been missing from Flickr since the first day of Hanukah, you might not know about the new online editing feature. Flickr's new partnership with Piknick makes it possible to edit your photos splendidly and seamlessly online. For free!

Maybe we should call it a hat trick. Flickr, the loldolphins love you.

Popularity: 11% [?]