I use my husband's once in a while for these shots, and once in a while I get off a lucky shot using the auto setting.
Don't sell yourself short -- I remember you had a really good image in the last Winter seasonal, and seem to recall another one in a recent monthly contest (was it "still life?").
Plus, all the post-processing does is prove you are good at manipulation, not photography necessarily.
With all due respect, the oft-assumed dichotomy between "photography" and "post-processing" (as if "the only thing that counts is what happens before the shutter clicks") is the biggest canard (translation: "horse manure") spread about the art. As I believe I recently pointed out, people who have seen "straight" prints from Ansel Adams's negatives have said they look nothing at all like his famous enlargements. Adams would spend days on a given image, producing test print after test print, painstakingly dodging and burning small areas of each image, until he figured out a "recipe" for each image that, in his musical analogy, was "the performance" of that negative's "score." Would anyone suggest that he should merely have given his negatives to the corner drugstore and been satisfied with the prints they gave him back because anything further was merely "manipulation," and not "photography?" While I certainly would never claim to Adams's stature, back in my film days, I spent hours in my college's darkroom on a given enlargement, and would never have dreamed of considering a straight "contact print" to be the only honest reflection of my abilities as a photographer. And I didn't go as far as others -- all "amateurs," I would note -- who would figure out ways to build darkrooms into their homes or apartments, and even get (expensive!) color enlargers so that they wouldn't have to be restricted to black-and-white. Should they have just been told to be satisfied with prints from Fotomat instead?
There are many of us here who cannot afford photoshop and really just barely can use their camera.
I find it ironic that this should come up, since this was one of the sarcastic comments aimed at this group by the poster who got so upset about not being allowed to use frames: Since not everyone can afford Photoshop, why not require straight out-of-camera JPEGs? Furthermore, since not everyone can afford an SLR, why not require contest entries only come from the cheapest possible point'n'shoot? But, in fact, even if you can't afford Photoshop (and I wouldn't have been able to do so, if I didn't have a school-age child in the house...you
do know that you can get student discount pricing on Adobe software, even if your "student" is in kindergarten, don't you?), you can still find many good image-processing programs for far less, including Adobe's own Photoshop Elements and Lightroom. There's even a reasonably-powerful "open source" (i.e. free) image editor known as GIMP. As to not knowing how to use one's camera...it seems to me that
some level of skill and knowledge should be expected of people submitting their photos to a competition, even if they consider themselves "rank amateurs." (Fortunately, based on your own images, a deficit of skill or knowledge doesn't seem to be the case for you.)