The hands in the photograph are immediately noticed (e.g. the smudged, mushy look of the hands). I wonder: why did the judges not noticed the hands in the photo?
Yeah thats a 5 second exercise for anybody who ever came to contact with ie Midjourney output, fingers here have various usual bugs.
Honestly I believe author did include this on purpose, since its very well known shortcoming at this point. He could have done image without fingers displayed and then nobody would have a clue. But clearly judges are oblivious to recent development in some too-old-for-this-shit fashion, so they didnt pick it up and then embarassed themselves.
Could be that they assumed it must be a photo and the smudge was done intentionally as an artistic expression? The art world is so out of touch now I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case.
My guess is that they focused on the focal point of the image - the face, and especially the eyes - and didn't try to pick apart the whole image.
The white smudges in the center/top, and the yellow glow on the top of the left side seem like artifacts of a manual development process. That's likely something that would interest a photography judge - maybe the judge(s) here were just biased toward experimental analog processing and was therefore blind to the issues we immediately see?
