Though there are a lot of great photos in the pool today, this image taken at Haines Point of The Awakening by Brandon Jones seemed like the perfect shot to start off the new year. EXIF.

Did you resolve to enter the DCist Exposed Photography Show this year? You only have 11 more days to submit your application and put your entries in the pool.

And since it is the beginning of a new year and all, we thought we'd take just a second to thank everyone who contributes the photos we use for our posts every day and offer a few reminders about how best to use our Flickr pool to get your work on DCist. Follow me after the jump.

We spend about zero time regulating our pool, so we rely on the good will of you folks to keep things relevant. Keep these in mind when submitting your photos to DCist.

• Submit your photos to the DCist pool. We keep a limit of three photos per user per day, which allows everyone equal space. Photo of the Day is chosen only from photos that are actually in the pool.
• Tag your photos "DCist," in addition to submitting them to the pool. We realize you can tag an unlimited number of photos every day, but we ask that you don't. If you have 100 photos of Sundays game, try to pick which three we might actually use on a post, and don't make us wade through every single one. We're much more likely to skip right over you and go straight to a photographer who submitted that one great shot.
• Tag your photos with whatever is in the shot. This includes, but is not limited to: the neighborhood or venue, objects in the shot, the event recorded, or well-known people in the shot (i.e. Mayor Fenty). When we search for an image for our next parking meter post, we'll search "dcist, 'parking meter'", so if you just add it to the pool with no tags, we might see it the first day or two that you submitted it, but then it will be buried under tomorrow's 50 new photos. You can go back and add tags to anything you've already added to the pool; the more specific you are, the more likely we'll call up your photo when we need it.
• Make sure your settings allow people to download your photos. You can do this in your "Account," under "Privacy and Permission." We understand that some of you don't want the general public to be able to download your photos, so as an alternative, you can make our DCist Flickr account your "Friend" or "Family" (it has to be more than just a Contact), and then only allow Friends or Family to download your photos. Technically, we can still grab them with some cut and pasting, but it's a pain in our arses and we're more than likely to just find a different photo.
• Your images should generally be from the D.C. metro area. We take this pretty broadly, and do like to see your photos from short road trips outside the city, but photos from New York, London, et cetera, have no relevance for us. Though keep in mind that doesn't mean we only want photos of D.C. monuments -- you can submit photos from in your house or of a flower from a yard that could be anywhere, and we'll trust you that it was taken in the local area. (And we have our ways to check up on this.)

If you have any questions or other tips about contributing to the pool, please leave them in the comments. We can't wait to see what you all come up with this year!