...just accept the results and rethink your strategy for the next competition....i have seen some judging processes before, and due to the short time-frame for judging, judges scan the thumbnails and click on those that strike them....so its important that your image is clean and able to be noticed as thumbnails....I am not sure its the same for this competition, but just imagine having to scan aver 2000 images within say an hour and discuss the results with the team of judges. I have judged online competition before and scanning through all the submission totaling about just 1000 could take hours to look at the full-sized version, so can you imagine the Canon Photomarathon judges to actually go through the images in full-size x 2000 x 3 themes....so as the entries gets bigger each year, its gets tougher to stand out in the crowd. If you don't win, it may not be because yours were not good enough....maybe you will get luckier and get noticed next time....