The matchup voting was a bad idea and has failed in establishing the best photos overall. Some of the absolute best photography was eliminated early on because it was matched up to other outstanding pictures. Both of which were clearly much stronger artistically than some of the other matches that were only paired because of similarities. The pictures were never compared as a whole, and ranked accordingly, but only compared to one single other picture. This left great pictures getting the boot while mediocre (by this competition's standards) pics continued to higher rounds. This was really disappointing. I feel bad for the photographer's who were eliminated early on because of this, only to see the top prizes going to worse photos simply because there were never compared against each other. Would it not have been simpler and more objective to simply have Pinkbike voters cast their vote for their one favorite, and then used the percentage of votes to rank them? Then simply eliminate the lowest 16, 8, 4 etc.. until voters had only the top 2 pictures by vote count left to choose from? Maybe next year. Good job to all the photographers! You are produced excellent pictures and captured the spirit of mtbing very well.