Earlier this year, we kicked off the Winter Photo Contest, looking for the best winter photos. We were taken by surprise by the amount of submissions, so we'd like to thank everyone for submitting amazing winter shots!

It wasn't easy narrowing the submissions down to one winner in each category, but we believe the winning entries have all the elements we were looking for.

We don't want any of our honorable mentions to leave empty handed, so we're giving away an Opera goodie bag as a token of our appreciation for their great skills in photography.

Without further ado, here are the winter photo contest winners!

Best photo:

WinnerWinter shot from a winter day in Kalingrad, Russia.

Honorable mentions:

2Cherries? On a tree? During winter? We're intrigued...

3Fantastic cold blue scenery.

4You don't get more melancholy than this. Even for a tree.

5Look up.

6The fountain is starting to struggle at zero below temperatures... Nice shot by musickna!

7Cross country skiing in white wintery scenery!

8Like something from the '70s, this shot is a favorite.

9Winter and Opera red. You don't need much more than that!

10Hooray! This snowman sure is happy about the snow. :-)

11Awesome picture from the Palmerston Park in Dublin, Ireland.

12Waiting for the train in Urasa-Niigata, Japan.

13Snow huts. We hope it's warm on the inside.

14A frozen lake. Or maybe an early sign of spring?

15You don't want your car to be stranded on this lonely road!

16Early morning winter landscape. Great shot!

We were also looking for the best photo manipulation. Even though there were not as many submissions in this category, the quality was really high.

Best photo manipulation:

WinnerFreezing cold.

Honorable mentions:

2Roof view with an edge.

3X marks the spot.

4Divine feeling.

5Great pastel color pallette.

My Opera has received a bit of overhaul lately, such as the front page caching and varnish hacking (yes, it's technical and awesome), but we've also had time to update other parts of our community service.

If you look at the "share this" icons, they are now horizontally aligned with a cool hover effect. The photo uploader has also been given a new feature; it now shows thumbnails during upload, and your latest photos are displayed directly after upload is finished.

Choose Opera has a new top header image, which we hope you will like.

"Left 4 Dead 2" is a popular cooperative first-person shooter game and this gamer from Finland plays it a lot.

His blog is a salad of sweet stuff discovered on the "Intertubes" and we can easily recommend Mysticmaster's blog, this week's member of the week, for everyone to read and ejoy over the weekend!