OK, my highly non-scientific or methodical or analytic method of picking a winner has picked a winner. My methodology is to just keep looking at the images over and over and see which ones I kept coming back to the most. First, thanks to everyone who took part - it was great having a lot of fine shots to choose from. I was gonna do a list of honorable mentions, but it occurred to me that so many of the submitted shots would be on that list that it would be somewhat meaningless. So I didn't. I will give a shout out to all of the great shots of long hair in motion, with Davect01 being my favorite of those. And I loved pniev's underwater hair shot, and if he'd wanted it considered for the contest, it would have placed pretty high.
But in the end, my choice came down to two, Miguel's "wired", which I think is an absolutely brilliant self portrait, and Bill's (Lightmancer) very first shot. As much as I loved Miguel's shot, the winner is Bill's shot because it's ALL about the hair, ONLY about the hair, and about NOTHING BUT the hair, with no other story involved at all, and yet I still find it to be a brilliant photograph, and the one I came back to the most. When he first posted it on the first day of the challenge, I thought that's gonna be a tough one to beat and it turned out that way. I love the glorious, all over the place, wild, random, yet thoroughly styled HAIR in that photo. I love that I'm not even totally sure if it's human hair on a human head or if it's a wig being worked on. I'm pretty sure there's a woman under there, but it doesn't really matter if she's real or plastic. There's no story about the person wearing the hair, just the presence of the out of focus stylist in the background. And it's also technically great, with the narrow DOF and wonderful B&W processing.
So, congrats Bill, wonderful photograph! Now it's your turn...
-Ray