fadedphotographs,
You may not agree with our decision, but we have an honest process to make the selection. We screen the eligible submissions and come up with a list of three to five photos that are finalists. We then have a panel of judges who vote. Two of these are graphic artists, one is our Product Analyst (who also is a Top Rated Seller), one is from customer support, and one of the judges is me. We look at the photos and we vote for the one we think is the best each month. The votes get tabulated and the winner is picked.
As a veteran of entering many competitive fine art photo exhibitions, I can tell you that many times that when I saw the winning photographs, I disagreed with the judge of the show as to which photo was best. Judging photographs is inherently subjective, and there are no fixed rules for what constitutes simple, clear and professional photography. Different people can looking at the same photos can disagree; that's why we use a panel of people who work here.
That said, we are not retreating in any way for our selection of the best photo for the month; we selected as winner the photo we felt was the best photo for that month.
We welcome all Auctiva sellers to submit to the contest in coming months.