A photography contest built to reward people who lie face-down in mud for six hours has a winner who spent six seconds. The image was generated by software. Nobody on the panel noticed until the internet did.
The judges had been looking at the pixels, not the sky. The sky looked fine.
Then the backlash arrived, which is how these things always work. The crowd finds the flaw, and the company finds a press release. Nikon now says it is re-evaluating the rules and procedures of its Small World in Motion contest. Translated from corporate, that means a committee has been formed and nobody has been fired.
The brand that sells cameras has, for one news cycle, awarded its top prize to an image no camera took. Is that a scandal or a product demo? Nobody at the company is sure, and the press office is still choosing adjectives.
Judges are now asking for raw files, a sentence nobody expected to type this decade.