For this episode of The Weekly Flickr, we asked the Flickr community to show us the most important women in their lives. We wanted to hear about your mothers, grandmothers, significant others and best friends — the women who changed and inspired you to become the person you are today.

We received countless photos and featured as many of them as we could with personal testimonials from contributing photographers. We hope you all celebrate the women in your life as well!

MOTHER

“This is my beautiful mother. The older I grow, the more I realize how perfect my life has been, despite all of the hardships my family and I have faced together. She encouraged me to go after each and every dream of mine. She taught me strength, love, acceptance, and what it means to be happy even when life’s circumstances are telling you to feel the opposite. My thank you’s will never be enough for this awe-inspiring woman.” – kmitchell11

“She’s a powerful woman, who taught me the high value of independence, generosity and enjoyment.” – Daniel Ivan

GRANDMOTHER

“My grandma; the lady who taught me that having a positive attitude makes life easier.” – Ida/FarWestLogbook

“This amazing woman is my grandmother. She has been through so much strife — from losing her husband at a young age to having to raise five kids on her own. Not only did she raise my mom, aunts, and uncles, she raised me. In a sense, she is my mother, my best friend, and my everything. Her smile is as contagious as her love!” – Terry Vo

MY LOVE

“Monica is my other half, who always smiles as beautiful as you can see on this picture. She is the same as me, with the same positive and negative qualities, with the same values and family background. And she is always supporting me in photography ;)” – p.dave

“Amy Chu, my wife who changed my life too much. I first met her in the late 2008 in my own coffee shop when she went here with her friends. And I think I loved her at first sight. Now we’re happy together and plan to have a child in the next year!” – Khanh Hmoong

BEST FRIEND

“This woman is my best friend, Nikki. She inspires me daily by sharing her love of teaching with her students, family, friends and with our children. She truly enjoys watching people’s eyes light up when they finally understand a concept that they’ve been struggling with. I am inspired by her strength, grace and love for helping others.” – Pink Sherbert Photography

“Women like her come from the lower rung of the society, where resources are limited, survival is difficult, no education, and it is a constant struggle to make ends meet. But the most amazing thing is that, despite all this, they manage to smile through. This woman is [a person of] fisherfolk. I come across her very often, and I have always seen her smile. We all need to learn from them because we seem to get perplexed and worried with the slightest problem. We need to be calm and composed to deal with it all.” – M D

Explore the photos in this video episode and find out more about the photographed women in our “Women’s History Month” galleries part 1 and part 2.

Do you want to be featured on The Weekly Flickr? We are looking for your photos that amaze, excite, delight and inspire. Share them with us in the The Weekly Flickr Group or tweet us at #theweeklyflickr.

Candice Sedighan has a passion for two things: her golden retriever, Champ, and photography. Over the last few years she’s been able to successfully bring the two together.

“I wanted to take photos and show people things they’ve never seen before,” the 20-year-old photographer and college student tells The Weekly Flickr.

Take for example: Champ ‘Dressed to impress’ or Champ ‘Underwater’.

“I really like to capture the true essence with dogs, which is that they’re always so happy,” she says. “The time Champ and I spend together, he’s just always beaming with happiness and you can really see that through my photos.”

Candice got Champ as a gift from her Dad in the winter of 2002. He was just 9 weeks old at the time and, as she describes him, he was a “’Marley and Me’ type of puppy”.

“He destroyed probably everything in his sight!” Candice admits. “He ate a lot of rugs, thousands of dollars of damage. He had a lot of excess energy and I tried to channel that into training instead.”

She began taking pictures of Champ when she was 13 years old. At first it was to create personal memories, but after getting positive comments, she decided to join Flickr.

“Flickr helped me take photography to the next level,” says Candice. “I’ve been able to get a lot of feedback from other photographers as well as dog lovers.”

Candice joined a group called “52 Weeks for Dogs” where members take pictures of their dogs once a week for an entire year. The group gave her the encouragement she needed to pursue her photography, allowing her to develop her unique style.

“Champ and I really are like a team when we do our ‘52 Weeks for Dogs’ project,” says Candice. “He really works very hard to do the poses I’m asking him to do. His tricks and the commands that he knows are really helpful when it comes to taking pictures of him.”

More importantly, she saw Champ was responsive to her photo shoots and recognized an opportunity to take her craft to the next level.

“My favorite photo of Champ is the one with the butterfly on his nose,” Candice explains. “I know a lot of people just automatically assume maybe that I photoshopped the butterfly in, but I actually went over to a butterfly farm and bought butterflies.”

Her years of training Champ proved to be a success as he patiently sat with a live butterfly on his nose. The pictures turned out beyond any of her expectations.

Candice says she gets her inspiration from “everyday life.”

“Sometimes I’ll go to the store and find a really nice prop that I want to use,” she says. “Or I’ll find a nice location and I think, ‘Wow, I really want to use this in a picture’ or ‘this would look really awesome in a picture.’”

Candice has taken close to 20,000 pictures of Champ over the last 7 years. During this time she’s won about $5,000 in contests, including three for Hallmark. She now has three cards available nationwide; one birthday card and two Mother’s day cards (one of Champ up close and the other of him sniffing a dandelion).

In the midst of all the success, Candice values the special bond between her and Champ above everything else. He has been a source of comfort for her, especially during the most difficult times.

In the Summer of 2012, Candice’s father passed away very unexpectedly. “My Dad was definitely supportive of my photography,” she says. “He always told me how creative I was and bought me my first DSLR.”

Photography has become a great outlet for Candice after losing her father; combining the two things she loves most.

“Since my Dad was the one who picked Champ out and named him, so in a way it makes him even more special to me,” she says. “It makes me feel like my Dad will always be here with me.”

What’s next for Candice? She dreams of coming out with a calendar featuring Champ, but she definitely plans to pursue photography.

“I really like to take happy photos,” she says, “And I hope when people see it, they see it as more than just a dog picture. I hope they’ll see it as art.”

Visit Candice’s photostream for more of her photography.

"I think of myself as a photography factory," says photographer and blogger Thomas Hawk, who has embarked upon a journey to shoot and publish 1 million photos before he dies.  "I am obsessed with photography, but I think an obsession can be the same thing as passion."

Thomas, in his mid-40s, carries his camera everywhere he goes for fear that he may miss a great photo opportunity. But he still has a long way to go in order to achieve his goal.

"I’ve almost uploaded 79,000 photographs to Flickr," he says. "I have another 22,000 or so photographs that are ready to go on Flickr."

His "love affair" with photography started when he got his first Kodak Instamatic camera as a 7-year-old. At 15, his parents bought him his first SLR before he took a bicycle trip across America. "Riding your bicycle across America when you are 15 really gave me an early appreciation for America," Thomas says.

In his quest to take 1 million photos, one of the things he wants to do is document America’s 100 largest cities.

"I think I have shot maybe 36 out of 100 so far," he says. "I want to shoot the entire country in the most comprehensive and substantial way it has ever been done."

Thomas specifically wants to capture the parts of America that are temporary before they disappear.

"I think people will want to go back in the future and remember a different type of America; a place that was unique to their time frame," says Thomas.

Architecture is one aspect of Americana that is always changing. He cites Detroit as a perfect example.

"Detroit is in massive decline. There are tens of thousands of abandoned structures in Detroit. There is nothing like that in the world, really, that I have ever seen and I want to capture that and show that part of America before it’s gone."

Thomas is also fascinated by neon signs, which are also fading away. "Back in the day, before things like florescent light bulbs were around and plastics, a neon sign was a great way to draw someone to your business; it was very bright and vivid," he says. "So much of that signage is torn down and is going to be lost and gone forever."

He also loves the people of America because they are all so different depending on the part of the country. "You’ll shoot people dressed to the nines out on South Beach in Miami. You’ll shoot people in New York with their sort of unique fashion sense. But then you’ll go to someplace like Fort Worth, Texas and you’ll find a whole different culture: You’ll find cowboys."

"I think the world is such a beautiful place," Thomas says. "Every place I go I am convinced it is my favorite place, and yet I go to someplace else and that place becomes my favorite place."

But his desire to shoot 1 million photos in his lifetime does not come easy. It is a struggle to keep up such a rapid pace.

"It is a lot of hard work being out there on the road and shooting, by no means is it easy," he says. "If I decide to go to a city and I’m gonna shoot for 20 hours, and I am going to sleep for four, and I am just exhausted at midnight, the last thing that I want to do is get up in the morning at 5 am for sunrise. That’s hard."

There is also a struggle to find time with his family in between his day job as an investment advisor and his ambitious goal. He is married, with four young children. "It’s a struggle to keep a certain amount of balance in my life with my family, and making sure I give them enough time at the same time I’m pursuing this passion," he says.

"Do I feel like time is running out, ever?  Yeah," Thomas says. "You only have so many breaths and then you’re gone. So there is a race against the clock in a way. I try to really maximize the time I do have."

While he doesn’t know if he will be able to reach his goal, he’s certainly going to keep trying.

"For me it is a way for me to keep my focus to keep working with an intensity that I think produces the work that I want to do," he says. "It takes incredible discipline drive and passion to accomplish big things and I want to accomplish something big with photography."

Visit Thomas’s photostream for more of his photography.

More from The Weekly Flickr

We need your help! March is Women’s History Month, and The Weekly Flickr wants to celebrate the women who have changed your life. Before February 28, please add photos of her in The Weekly Flickr group and include a brief description about how she impacted your world for a chance to be featured in an upcoming episode.

Tweet about this video series with #theweeklyflickr, and watch previous episodes of the show.

Olivia Bee may be young, but her work has been sought after by some of the world’s most iconic brands.

“I’ve worked for Converse, Nike, Subaru, The New York Times,” the 18-year-old professional photographer from Portland, Oregon, tells The Weekly Flickr. “I did a really big feature for Hermès this summer, which was really amazing to be trusted so much by such an iconic brand.”

When Olivia snaps her camera, she has one ambition:  “I want to evoke nostalgia in everyone,” she says.

Coming from someone with less than two decades of life experience, that may sound a bit sophomoric.  But just take a look at her photos and her resume.

“I am really inspired by daily life and the beauty that that can hold: like the way someone holds their pencil or the way someone smiles at their best friend or the way someone walks down the street,” she explains. “I am very influenced by the ’60s and ’70s, and also the styling from the ’70s really influences the way I put colors together, but I think that you can see that I shoot through a young lens.”

She got her start in photography by accident while in middle school at  just 11 years of age.

“I wanted to be in video production, but they gave me photography,” Olivia explains. “It was kind of like the best mistake that could have been made by my school counselor, because I just, like, fell in love with this art.”

But her love for the medium did not come immediately.

At first, “I was really frustrated with it,” she says. “But then, slowly I became less and less frustrated and more determined to make really nice photos.”

Shortly thereafter, she began to post her images to Flickr.  “I just really liked to show the world what I was seeing,” Olivia says.

“I was a freshman in high school when Converse approached me. Their ad agency kept sending me Flickr messages, and I just kept ignoring it,” she says, explaining that she thought the messages were spam. “And so finally, Converse emailed me directly and was like ‘Hey, this is Converse, we wanna shoot with you’ and I was like ‘Whoa, I know about Converse.’”

Before she knew it, they invited her on set for a photo shoot. Olivia was just 15 years old at the time.

“I was so scared,” she recollects. “But by the end of the day, I was like, ‘You can do this for a living?!  Sign me up!’”

“Being so young and working in the fashion industry is really great,” she says. “I get to work with a lot of amazing brands, a lot of amazing people, but it is also hard because when I am hired for a job or I am working on my own photo, I give it 100%, sometimes 500%.”

Olivia works roughly 80 hours a week and gets really involved in all her work. She likes to do all her own styling, color correcting, editing, casting, and set design. She is also very often her own muse.

Despite the long hours and tireless effort she puts forth, she loves what she does.

“I love photography because it is a way for me to really to show my life to myself and be like ‘look at all this amazing stuff you’ve experienced,’” she explains. ”It really makes me think that my life has been totally worth living and really helps me appreciate every single day.”

Her advice to photographers who are just starting out: “Don’t focus on success, that will really do you wrong. Success in terms of money and fame — that won’t mean anything. You should focus on success in terms of what you love and what makes you happy.”

Visit Olivia’s photostream for more of her photography.

More from The Weekly Flickr

We need your help! March is Women’s History Month, and The Weekly Flickr wants to celebrate the women who have changed your life. Before February 28, please add photos of her in The Weekly Flickr group and include a brief description about how she impacted your world for a chance to be featured in an upcoming episode.

Tweet about this video series with #theweeklyflickr, and watch previous episodes of the show.

In this edition of The Weekly Flickr, we asked you to give us some inspiration ahead of Valentine’s Day 2013.

We asked, and you showed us some love by sharing your photos celebrating the things you cherish most, from engagement and wacky wedding photos, to images showcasing your love for the little ones in your life, to nature photos that really demonstrate just how much love is in the air and everywhere!

After you’ve watched the video, be sure to check out our “Love is in the air” galleries showcasing many of your submissions: Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV

More from The Weekly Flickr

Share your photos in The Weekly Flickr group for a chance to be featured in an upcoming episode, tweet about this video series with #theweeklyflickr, and watch previous episodes of the show.

Christopher Renfro has been painting with light for the last three years.

“When I first found light painting in 2009 it just completely blew my mind,” he tells The Weekly Flickr. “I have spent my entire life really not knowing who I am, what I am supposed to do, or why I am here and when I found light art photography I knew instantly who I was.”

As Christopher describes, “light art photography is the methodical movement of a light source in front of a camera set to a long exposure.”

He does the majority of his work at night in natural environments.  “I am particularly fond of the twilight before it gets fully dark, where I can exploit the natural light before it completely leaves,” he says.

What is amazing about his photos is that all of his work is done totally in-camera. “I don’t even know how to really use Photoshop,” Christopher says.

“I make the orbs by having a wire with a light on one and a switch on the other, with a wire in between,” he explains. “You swing this vertically while pivoting around a center point and it creates a perfect sphere if you do it right.”

It usually takes him between six or eight tries before he gets one image he is happy with.

“The light sparks are actually steel wool. I secure it to a string, light it with a 9-volt battery or a lighter, and just start swinging away and sparks just go flying everywhere,” he says. “When you’re working with steel wool, it’s very important that you’re aware of your surroundings and possible things that could catch on fire. It is a little bit hard for it to cause a fire, but it’s certainly possible.”

He has taken thousands of exposures since taking his first image and each is just as exciting to see as the first.

But light art photography has become much more than just an enjoyable passion for Christoper. It is his savior.

“I have a mental illness called borderline personality disorder, and it has created a lot of challenges in my life,” he explains. “When I’m having a rough day I can just go off and create art. And just the act of creating something is very therapeutic to me.”

Flickr played a very important part in helping him find himself back in 2009.

“I posted my first pictures to Flickr and almost immediately someone from the Light Junkies group invited me to the group, and I discovered this amazing community of fellow light geeks,” he says. “I wouldn’t be here and have gotten this far with them and their support.”

His advice to those with his illness is to never give up. “You don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring,” he says.

View Christopher Renfro’s photostream.

More from The Weekly Flickr: Share your photos in The Weekly Flickr group for a chance to be featured in an upcoming episode, and tweet about this video series with #theweeklyflickr. Or watch previous episodes of The Weekly Flickr.

National Geographic is world-renowned for some of the most spectacular photos ever taken and published. But when NatGeo veteran Jim Richardson heads off on assignment around the world or across America, the types of images he hopes to capture may surprise you.

“What I look for is very much the commonplace. I look for those things that are common between us, that we all experience,” Jim, who has taken five around-the-world trips, tells The Weekly Flickr. “It’s life and death and children and getting married and the first day you send your kid off to kindergarten, and all those kinds of things. Those are the things that really leap across the boundaries, and those are the pictures we all understand no matter which culture we come from.”

Jim has worked as a freelance photographer for NatGeo for the last 25 years; and since 1989, he has not worked anywhere else.

“They are pure visual communications,” he says. “You see them. You understand. You get the message without ever having to process it.”

The early years

“I got started in photography out on the farm when I was a kid,” Jim says of his childhood growing up in rural Kansas. “My father was an amateur photographer.”

In the accompanying video, he recounts the story of how his father brought home an entire darkroom kit one day.

“I could take and set up a darkroom in our kitchen at night,” he says. “And the wonder of putting that first piece of paper into the developer and seeing the image come out, that’s always magic.”

From that point on, he started to take pictures of virtually everything, including his dog — chasing squirrels and lightning storms at night — and flowers in the woods.

Despite taking photos of everything as a boy, Jim never thought he’d end up as a professional photographer. He had actually pursued psychology in college at Kansas State University until he realized what he’d be doing day-to-day as a psychologist. “I didn’t want to do that,” he says.

He decided to get a position working as a photographer for his college school newspaper. He eventually landed a job at the Topeka Capital Journal where he has been working for 11 years. From there, he jumped to the Denver Post as a special projects photographer, but after five years of “wandering the West” he left for National Geographic.

NatGeo and returning to his roots

One of his first assignments at NatGeo was a story about the Colorado River. It was a story about resources, water, and economics.

“It wasn’t an adventure story, and it really clicked with me,” he explains.

Over the years, the stories and places Jim has been most passionate about and revisited multiple times seem to always bring him back to his roots.

“I have spent a lot of time in the Celtic world because my ancestors, as it turns out, all came from Celtic parts of the world,” he says. “I’ve sort of, over that time, made myself into the expert and the guy with the biggest collection of pictures from that part of the world.”

But perhaps the body of work Jim is most known for are his photographs taken in the little town of Cuba, Kansas, of not more than 200 people situated just 10 miles from his hometown.

“I’ve gone back there hundreds of times,” he says. “[It] was a great small town, rich in life, and as it turned out, very rich in pictures.”

Because of his time in Cuba, barber shops are of particular interest to Jim.

“I stop for all barbers, all over the world. I’ve done it ever since I started taking pictures back in rural Kansas,” he says. “It’s one of those places that is a universal necessity, ritual of everyday life, and you can depend that it will be interesting.”

Over the decades, especially during his time spent in Cuba, Jim learned that good stories are everywhere. “Those things that I learned there are the things that I use every day when I’m out shooting for National Geographic,” he says. “Almost anything can become a compelling story with sufficient research and understanding and devotion.”

The role of a photographer

Jim believes the role of a photographer is to “add to the beauty of the world.”

“It really comes down to if you are going to be a participant in beauty or a consumer. If you’re a participant, you find the things that are beautiful in a place. If you’re a consumer, you simply go and take and leave, and you don’t add anything,” he explains. “One of our jobs as photographers is to add to the beauty, by finding it and bringing [it] forth and putting it in front of people, and letting them share it and hopefully expanding the beauty of our world.”

This is what let him to return time and time again to places he had previously photographed.

“Early on, I started going back more and more in my photography, and what I learned from going back to the same situation over and over again is there was more there than I ever imagined,” he says. “My imagination wasn’t as rich and wonderful as reality, and if I really tuned myself to see the reality, there were just absolute wonders to be found.”

Jim now also frequently sails on adventure cruises aboard the “The National Geographic Explorer” ship to places like Antarctica, Norway, and the British Isles. His role ranges from lecturer to resident photography expert.

View Jim Richardson’s photostream.

More from The Weekly Flickr: Share your photos in The Weekly Flickr group for a chance to be featured in an upcoming episode, and tweet about this video series with #theweeklyflickr. Or watch previous episodes of The Weekly Flickr.

When Matthew Albanese began his Strange Worlds project in 2008, he says, it was very much about “tricking the eye.”

“I would describe the photography that I do as small scale dioramas that I build by hand out of everyday, simple, mundane materials and transform them into an image through the lens of my camera making them look hyper-realistic,” he says in the accompanying video episode of The Weekly Flickr. “I’ve used ostrich feathers to create willow trees. I’ve used steel wool to create a tornado. Nothing is off limits.”

By day, Matthew is a professional fashion photographer. By night, for the last five years, he’s been creating large dioramas of tiny environments and photographing them. If you knew nothing about his process, you’d think his photographs were of real life places.

He stumbled upon his Strange Worlds idea by accident one day while in the kitchen at work.

“The first Strange World that I created was Paprika Mars,” Matthew details. “I had spilled paprika in the kitchen and instead of cleaning it, I was playing with it. It was the color and the texture and I just had the inspiration to create Mars out of it.”

Ever since he can remember, he has always been a “daydreamer.”

“When I was young I was always very, very obsessed with movie miniatures and movie magic and things of small scale,” he says. “Even just to see a place that I couldn’t see in person, it was a way for me to try to see the surface of Mars.”

Matthew began building his creations in the back of his father’s old warehouse. He has since moved the production of his Strange Worlds to his living room.

“Having these in my living room can be overwhelming most of the time. They take up so much space and so much time to create that I have to literally walk over them, walk under them, and walk around them,” he says with a twinge of frustration. “I don’t have many visitors.”

It can take him anywhere from three to seven months to build one Strange World and he takes thousands of exposures to document the process.

“I’ll make a change, and I’ll make a capture. And, I’ll make another little change and I’ll make a capture,” Matthew says.

When he is done building the diorama, he sets the lighting and prepares the special effects.

“I do minimal digital editing on my work,” he explains. “The most I will do is composite different parts together in order to get the right exposure.”

When he is done photographing scenes, he usually destroys the dioramas because they are not really built to last.

Matthew gets his inspiration from a number of sources.

“‘How to Breathe Underwater’ came around at a time in my life where I was sort of overwhelmed by everything that was happening to me,” he says. In this Strange World, “I used jelly beans carved and rolled by hand to create sea anemones. I used wire coated in fabric glitter to create some kind of sea urchins, and brain coral was made out of walnuts.”

But the process is not always easy, he admits.

“I have been very discouraged many times building these. It can be very frustrating,” Matthew says. “But I found that making mistakes was the best thing for the work because I was able to discover methods and strategies to build future landscapes.”

When people look at his photos, Matthew hopes onlookers see beyond the shock value of the materials that he uses and the result.

“I hope that they see more than just a pretty picture of a landscape,” he says. “I hope they have a strong emotional connection to the work.”

“When I look back on my body of work, I feel a sense of accomplishment,” says Matthew. “The thing that is most fulfilling is knowing that I can inspire someone like me to get out there and create something. If I can create the surface of Mars out of paprika and a tornado out of steel wool, there is nothing you can’t do.”

Matthew Albanese’s first book Strange Worlds, with a text by David Revere McFadden, will be published by Lazy Dog Press in Spring 2013. You can also follow Matthew’s activities on his Facebook fan page.

More from The Weekly Flickr: Share your photos in The Weekly Flickr group for a chance to be featured in an upcoming episode, and tweet about this video series with #theweeklyflickr.

Or watch previous episodes of The Weekly Flickr: The story behind amazing WTC pics | The Weekly Flickr wishes you a happy New Year | Budding photographer finds living in surrealism | Breezy Point will be back

Follow Flickr on Twitter to get updates about upcoming The Weekly Flickr episodes: Follow @flickr

“I’m an elevator man, not a photographer.”

Those are the words of Scott Lahmers, technical specialist for ThyssenKrupp Americas, who is currently working on installing 74 elevators and 9 escalators in the One World Trade Center, Tower One, in Lower Manhattan.

In today’s fourth episode of The Weekly Flickr, we feature the collection of photos Scott took, very unexpectedly, on December 18 when he captured the last two escalators being brought into the monumental building.

“We didn’t expect the escalators to be hoisted that day because of the weather,” Scott says in the accompanying video of the two escalators which will serve the observation level more than 100 floors above the ground.

“We don’t usually take escalators that high,” he says, explaining that transportation of escalators is most often done on the ground or below ground. “So to see an escalator go over a hundred stories in the building is a little unusual.”

The process to hoist each 38,000 pound escalator took 15 to 20 minutes, Scott says, and another 30 minutes to bring into the building at the top. There was a crew of elevator constructors on the ground to attach the rigging and another crew at the top to guide the escalators inside.

“ThyssenKrupp has about 65 people working on the project on the site,” Scott says. “When I took the photos it was to memorialize or document the day for us.”

Little did he know that when he would post them online they would go viral and be picked up by a number of news organizations.

“I never anticipated the appreciation from other people, from other sources,” says Scott. “To be frank, when I posted them, I hadn’t even looked at the photos. So it was a surprise to me when the feedback started coming.”

But takings the photos and being involved in the World Trade Center project is not just about him.

“It’s about what One World Trade Center signifies for our country, for the people that work there, and for the people that lost their loved ones in nine eleven,” Scott says. “The project is a memorial to the families and the people that lost their lives on 9/11. And all the men, women that are working on that site.”

For him and his colleagues working on the World Trade Center, there will never be a more important project.

“It’s an honor for me to work on One World Trade Center,” he says. “It’s symbolic for our strength and resolve to be free, to be a free country.”

View all of Scott’s photos in the One World Trade Center Escalator Rigging set from ThyssenKrupp Elevator Americas, and see how the top of the One World Trade Center was installed in the Freedom Tower Spire gallery.

Watch previous episodes of The Weekly Flickr: The Weekly Flickr wishes you a happy New Year | Budding photographer finds living in surrealism | Breezy Point will be back

Share your photos in The Weekly Flickr group for a chance to be featured in an upcoming episode, and tweet about this video series with #theweeklyflickr.

Happy 2013!

In this edition of The Weekly Flickr we wanted to showcase how the many members of the Flickr community around the world spent the first day of the New Year.

We asked, and you shared your images from parades to polar bear swims to enjoying family, friends and the great outdoors.

After you’ve watched the video, be sure to check out our galleries: Part I | Part II | Part III

Want to be featured on The Weekly Flickr? We are looking for your photos that amaze, delight, and inspire. Share your photos with us in the The Weekly Flickr group. Tweet us at #theweeklyflickr.