BBC WPotY winners announced…
The results of the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition have just been announced and it looks like 2008 is the year of the snow leopard. Images of these incredibly rare animals, taken using camera traps, won the photographer, Steven Winter, the overall Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award, the Gerald Durrell Award for Endangered Wildlife (along with two further images that were specially commended in this section) and a runner-up in the Animal Behaviour: Mammals section. Not far from a clean sweep - congratulations to Steve.
If you take a look at his site you’ll see a gallery of image from the Hukwang Valley Tiger Reserve in Myitkyina District, northern Myanmar. This was set up with the help of Dr Alan Rabinowitz, one of my absolute heroes. If you ever get the chance, get hold of one of his books - ‘Jaguar’, ‘Beyond the Last Village’, ‘Chasing the Dragon’s Tail’ and ‘Life in the Valley of Death’ - all of which highlight the realities of wildlife conservation.
Back on-topic slightly, the Underwater World section of the WPotY was won by Brian Skerry, another National Geographic photographer, with a photo of a very close encounter with a whale. He also got the runner-up slot and was specially commended for an image that could only have been taken at Blue Mao Mao Arch in the Poor Knights, New Zealand. If you have ever been lucky enough to dive there, you will recognise it immediately! The image below was taken at the Arch during the Reef shoot:
However my personal favourite is a shot of a black crested macaque by Stefano Unterthiner that took the runner-up place for the Gerald Durrell Award for Endangered Wildlife. Its a very simple image with almost no colour apart form the eyes of the macaque and in my opinion, more striking than the same photographer’s shot that won him the Animal Portrait section. Again, if you have ever been to Sulawesi you’ll know where these images were taken - up in the north, probably in the Tangkoko Nature Reserve. Here’s my version of a close encounter with one of these macaques.
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