I guess it really is a popularity contest. I think all the photos are cool because they convey something personal about the person who took them and/or the person whose ukulele it is, but (and I say this as someone who's posted the link to my entry on my Facebook page and asked people to vote for me), I suspect that most votes are the product of friends helping friends and not a judgment of what the best photo is in terms of lighting, composition, and all those other things by which photographs are generally judged. The popularity aspect of the vote is only exacerbated by the fact that people can vote every 24 hours. This isn't a complaint -- I didn't enter the contest with any expectation of winning (and I promised myself I'd give the ukulele away if I did win it) -- and I think that HMS can use any means it chooses to award prizes, but I expect that the final vote will be more of a statement about which entrants were able to motivate more people to vote for them more often than it will be about anything else.