A picture of an elusive snow leopard on a night-time prowl has won the prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2008 award.

Steve Winter’s image was captured during a 13-month quest to snap the perfect photo of the endangered species in its hostile habitat high in the mountains of Central Asia.

BBC article by Mark Kinver

This is pretty amazing stuff. Both the BBC article, and the extended gallery at the Natural History Museum are worth a visit.

Photokina 2008: The Metadata Working Group, an alliance between Adobe, Apple, Canon, Microsoft, Nokia and Sony has published its first guidelines on the use of image metadata. The guidelines suggest methods to increase interoperability and storage of shooting settings and other associated data in digital images. It aims at standardizing the availability of metadata across all applications and devices, making it easier for users to create, organize and share their pictures.

I’m really glad to see this initiative taking off. More at DP Review

Or download the specification (PDF: 1.7M) from the Metadata Working Group website.

I’m very glad to see the arrival of Nikon’s second FX (full frame) digital SLR: Nikon D700. The new camera is essentially a D300 with a full frame sensor built in.
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Adding proper support for Exif, IPTC & XMP data to the gallery application that powers my Eyeballism site proved a lot more tricky than could be considered healthy by any stretch of the imagination. We quickly found ourselves trying to decipher the image meta tag soup mess we’re in.

Some of the issues we encountered:

• data may or may not be present in Exif headers
• data may be present at different locations
• data may be present in different formats
• data may be present in different formats at different locations with different values

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Last night I watched the excellent movie War Photographer for the umpteenth time. Anyone interested in either photography or world affairs is bound to appreciate this remarkable piece of cinematography. War Photographer was credited 16 international awards or nominations, including the prestigious Peabody Award. It is one of those features that is equally inspiring and disturbing.
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