I had a great time, though I have a new appreciation for sport photographers. It was very tough to get the players lit up when they wandered beyond the range of my flash. When I didn’t use a flash, they were moving so quickly that they were blurred. Still, I got a few good shots, and I enjoyed it a lot.

I encourage all my flickr friends to get tickets for the January 8th game so that you get a chance to get a floor pass next time. Click on “buy tickets here” at the bottom of the page.

SAMA will host the photo submissions on their Flickr site SAMA Museum Reach ( www.flickr.com/groups/sama_museum_reach ) and handle all rules, FAQs, and logistics. Photographs must be taken and uploaded between June 1 and July 12, 2009. The panel of judges, date to announce winners and other information will be released in June.

If you prefer, you can see the set of about 80 photos on my flickr account.

Here’s a map to the San Antonio Museum of Art. We’ll park in the parking lot in front of the museum. If that is closed, then we’ll park closer to the bridge over the new Museum Reach part of the Riverwalk.

View Larger Map

SAMA Announces Flickr Photography Contest to Celebrate Opening of Museum Reach; Museum to host online photographs of new Riverwalk extension.

Media contact: Leigh Baldwin. 210.978.8136 or leigh.baldwin@samuseum.org.

San Antonio, Texas – The San Antonio Museum of Art has launched a new online community project in honor of the opening of the Museum Reach: a photo contest to document the Reach over the summer, using the popular online photo community Flickr. Local amateur photographers are invited to shoot any aspect of the Museum Reach between Lexington and Grayson streets, including, but not limited to, the river itself, the lock and dam, the public art, the architecture and landscaping, and of course, the Museum, Pearl, the VFW Hall and other iconic institutions. From the submissions, twelve photographs will be chosen and the work mounted and hung in a special exhibition on the campus of the San Antonio Museum of Art.

“Social media is such a useful tool for building community spirit, and SAMA endeavors to stay at the forefront of this online technology. We hope the Flickr contest will engage people with this wonderful new landscape, increase traffic and awareness at the Museum Reach, and help emphasize that the Museum Reach is a project of beauty and art,” said Emily Jones, Deputy Director of the Museum.

SAMA will host the photo submissions on their Flickr site SAMA Museum Reach (http://www.flickr.com/groups/sama_museum_reach ) and handle all rules, FAQs, and logistics. Photographs must be taken and uploaded between June 1 and July 12, 2009. The panel of judges, date to announce winners and other information will be released in June.

SAMA is collaborating with FlickrClubSA.com, a very active group of local photographers started by Jim Rider in January 2007. You don’t need to be a member of FlickrClubSA.com to participate in the contest, but “anyone in San Antonio is welcome to attend our meetings and/or get involved in our group activities. If you are going out with your camera to shoot the Museum Reach and would like some company, just post a message on our discussion board and you’ll meet some new friends!” noted Jim. Jim’s group of more than 600 photographers from San Antonio can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/flickr-club-sa .

Rules and guidelines are attached to this release and can also be found at http://www.flickr.com/groups/sama_museum_reach/discuss .

For more details, become a fan of SAMA on Facebook. For a complete calendar listing of public exhibitions, lectures and other special events open to the public, visit SAMA’s Web site at www.samuseum.org. In celebration of San Antonio’s new Museum Reach and its groundbreaking public artworks, the San Antonio Museum of Art, with the help of the FlickrClubSA, is holding a Flickr contest to document the new Museum Reach. The contest begins June 1 and ends July 12. At the close of the contest, twelve photographs will be chosen by a panel of judges. Winners’ photographs will be printed, framed, and hung in a small exhibition at the San Antonio Museum of Art.

General Guidelines:

• Join the SAMA Museum Reach Flickr group in order to upload images http://www.flickr.com/groups/sama_museum_reach
• Image submissions must be by individuals
• You can photograph any scenery along the new Museum Reach. The new Museum Reach is contained between Lexington Avenue and Grayson Street. There is no checklist or scavenger hunt list; any area along within the linear park and attached buildings that stretch between those cross-streets qualifies.
• Shots may be taken at anytime of the day or night. We encourage the use of natural light and/or artificial light that is already part of the landscape.
• All images uploaded to the SAMA Museum Reach Flickr group should depict the new Museum Reach landscape, the public art along the River Reach, or the new construction along the Museum Reach such as SAMA’s River Landing or the Pearl Brewery pavilion.
• Upload your images to our SAMA Museum Reach Flickr group with the correct Creative Commons license required by SAMA. You can add a Creative Common license to your images here http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/. We ask that your images be under the Creative Common license Attribution Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ or Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/.

After the contest, all images uploaded to the SAMA Museum Reach Flickr group will be archived by SAMA staff as potential images for future educational, marketing, and promotional materials. In the event an image is chosen for one or all of these purposes, the photographer will be credited in full as he/she specified in Creative Commons.

Rules:

• Once winners are announced, they will be asked to re-submit a file that is at least 1 MG in order for their photographs to be printed at a resolution that meets museum standards.
• Shots must be tagged YourFirstName.YourLastName so we can easily sort them. SAMA staff may add other tags as needed in order to easily organize and track photos.
• Photos must be taken between June 1 and July 12, 2009.

To find out about SAMA Flickr contests in the future, become our fan on Facebook.

//end of press release and guidelines//

This is a photo I took of the backside — the new river side — of the San Antonio Museum of Art.

There’s a big party this weekend!

See http://sanantonioriver.org/museum_reach/grand_opening/grand_opening.html.

Here are some of the folks I met on a tour of the new Museum Reach part of the San Antonio Riverwalk.