As the hour approaches, I can feel the nervousness and anxiousness on the forums. The voting for the 2006 Photograph of the Year Contest is almost over. In less than an hour, I will start revealing who placed where in the results. Instead of keeping you guessing, here’s how it will all play out…

First, once the voting is over (there’s still a couple of minutes to cast your vote… and trust me, it’s a CLOSE ONE!!), I will tally the votes and then check for cheating and disqualify any photographs/votes if necessary. This will take me a little while. Once everything has been counted and checked out, I will post up a thread announcing the 9th Runner-Up, followed by a thread announcing the 8th Runner-up, followed by a thread announcing the 7th Runner-up, etc, etc. (The countdown will kill those of you in the finals, I know… but it’s so much more dramatic!) Finally, I will announce the overall winner, and then proceed to open up the voting results in the final voting thread so you can see what a tight race it was. By that time, it will be between 10pm and 11pm (for me at least). Since I’ve been here since around 9am this morning… well, 14 hours is a long work day, to say the least. I will send out the press releases to the appropriate press and release facilities, and then head home to get some sleep. If I’m still awake, I may PM the winners tonite as well.

Tomorrow, when I come back into work, I will do up another blog post about the contest, add the usernames to the photographs in the Final Voting Round Gallery, and update all the Photograph of the Year pages on the site. Once I’ve got all that figured out, I will be in touch with each of the winners to go over when and how they will be receiving all of their prizes. Woohoo!

Anyways, there’s about 30 minutes left to vote, so if you haven’t cast your ballot yet, do it now. There won’t be another Photograph of the Year contest for another year.

Good luck to all the finalists… and remember to breathe. I won’t know where to ship stuff to if you’re dead.