> the phone was probably held in a high quality tripod

Why is a high-quality tripod needed? You can just set the camera to be on a timer so that it's not shaking (from you touching the shutter button) when it captures the photo. I think it's also possible to use an Apple Watch to trigger the shutter.

> It is also likely that hundreds of dollars worth of software was used to edit each of these images.

Do photo contests typically allow entrants to heavily edit photos?