The former 5th-place image in the "Fish" challenge has been disqualified for combining elements of two distinct captures. Congrats to our new honorable mention, which isn't quite "honorable" yet since this decision was posted up after the challenge rolled off the front page, and therefore the placings aren't automatically adjusting.
We'd like to make clear that this was an awkward decision for us. We have never allowed multi-image compositing in advanced, of course; you can't do a burst shot of a model and then choose the best expression and swap it onto the best body, and you can't do a burst shot of, say, a scene with wildlife action and combine the one where the goose is making a perfect take-off with the one just before it where the OTHER goose is making the perfect landing. In this case, the photographer used two nearly identical exposures; one was better-exposed for the sushi but the fish was totally useless, and in the other the fish looked great but the sushi was slightly underexposed. This was very close to being an exposure-merge, in other words, which is perfectly legal. Unfortunately, the fish's position had changed so much between exposures that we had to rule that these were two distinct scenes and DQ the result.
