It’s that time of year again when I think about two things – Christmas presents that I want and 2017 Flickr Challenges.

Day 262

If you don’t know much about Flickr, then here are links to three posts that I wrote last year about Why I Love Flickr, My Favourite Flickr Groups and Flickr Do’s and Don’ts.

Today I’m going to point you to two great Flickr groups that are well worth joining which will help you with your photography and get you involved with the Flickr community.

The first is 52 Weeks : the 2017 Edition. This is a group that I’ve been a member of since 2012 and I will be one of the moderators again in 2017.

The concept is simple – each week a new theme is posted and it’s your challenge to go out in that week and take a new photo that fits the theme. Some times the themes are creative – Colour, Movie Poster, Bad Hair Day – and some times they are more technical – Shallow depth of field, Cyanotype, Motion. And following the theme isn’t compulsory either, the real challenge is to get you thinking about and taking a photo every week.

The other group that I really love is 117 Pictures in 2017 and again I’ve been a member of this group since 2012. The idea here is that there are 117 specific things to take a picture of during 2017. You can do them in any order, and many are open to creative interpretation so it’s not quite a daunting as it seems. There are usually a few date-specific items that have to be taken within a day or two of the stated day – this year we had Cow Appreciation Day as one of the topics.

Day 20

What makes this challenge easier is that you can pick the topics in any order, and if you shoot regularly you’ll be able to get a lot of the items done without too much effort. What makes this hard is that 117 pictures is more than two per week on average. At the moment I’ve completed 97 of the 116 pictures for this year. So I’ve got 19 left in 19 days!

Go on . . . sign up . . . you know you want to . . .