It's always good to see people who have long term goals on the site. We are only at the beginning here and you can see from all the new developments in the past few months that the journey is starting now.
Slowly but constant, I invested all of the profits in SP and I'm planning on doing exactly the same in the future as well.
There's a long way in front of my to becoming a dolphin.
I power up all of my SP now as well and the more you have, the easier it is to keep gaining. My first 9 months were spent reaching minnow status so maybe that goal is not too far away from you. The best thing I did was to get involved in the right communities, add value to them and try to find my place on the site. Someday that will hopefully be as a new dolphin.
I have partiko as well and find it so handy for keeping in touch with my account on here. It's so fast and easy to use that i have become a lot more active on the site just from having it on my phone.
I will have to try out your photo contest at some stage along the way. It looks like fun and just using partiko suits me anyway. I much rather give out SBI shares as prizes than STEEM itself. I do this because it gets people more involved in the blockchain when they have shares, rather than money that they can just cash out straight away. It provides upvotes which can be hard to come by for a lot of smaller accounts and i just like the concept in general. Each to their own but that's the way that i have gone for mine.