The Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition (SWPY) is one of the world's leading international photographic contests. The winning images form a highly emotive showcase of the splendor, drama, and variety of life on earth—an unforgettable experience for participants, visitors, and wildlife lovers alike. Microsoft is the proud digital technology sponsor of the competition. Over the past three years, Microsoft has worked closely with the Natural History Museum (NHM) to enable the competition to embrace a recent and inevitable shift to digital photography techniques and formats.
The competition began in 1964, receiving just 600 entries in that first year. Fast-forward to 2006 and SWPY now consists of 12 adult categories, two special awards, and a separate competition for young photographers, receiving in total around 18,000 entries annually. Over the past three years, the competition has been able to accept entries in digital format. In 2004, 10 percent of all entries were digital, rising to 34 percent in 2005. However, in 2006 digital submissions overtook conventional slide methods, representing 61 percent of entries.
The museum worked with iView over several months to customize the system as a judging tool. It was the perfect solution for viewing and cataloging images.
In 2003, the competition organizers realized the shift towards digital photography was inevitable, due to marketplace availability of digital software and hardware and the increasing quality of image capture made available through digital techniques. In order for SWPY to maintain its position within the photography community, operational changes were needed and entry and judging processes enhanced. In Microsoft, the museum found the perfect partner it required to make these changes happen.
Traditionally, photographers sent their slides for submission to the competition office and organizers manually logged, checked, and projected slides for judging. Winners were then selected before every single slide was carefully returned to each entrant. This process took months to complete. Working closely with Microsoft and partner companies, the museum aimed to develop a digital platform to improve the process by which images are submitted, judged, and stored. As digital uploading is increasingly prevalent among photographers sharing their work online, the obvious approach was to embrace a digital file-sharing culture and enable SWPY photographers to enter the competition online.
Making the change
Three main components were identified in the online entry process:
Online purchase of entry to the competition
The museum used its existing online shop to deliver the e-commerce aspect. Two customizations of the e-commerce solution were specified for this work. Firstly, the 'product' was not a normal retail SKU object, but rather a unique-per-customer sale of access to the online uploading system. So, instead of a product or ticket being physically delivered, the transaction results in the online shop displaying for the customer a unique code and login link to the uploading system. Secondly, the registration process was streamlined through the automatic communication of user data between the online shop and the digital entry database.
This work was carried out by The Other Media, providers of the museum's online shop service. At the back end, the online shop was integrated with the competition's online uploading system using XML Web Services. User details were passed automatically and securely to the online uploading database, and once a confirmation reply had been accepted by the online shop, an e-mail message was sent to the user with a unique ID that gave immediate access to the upload system.
Online submission and management of digital images
The museum built a database and web application to enable the uploading of digital images, image information entry, and export of digital entries to the judging system. Once registered with the system, users could upload images to the museum's servers. Crucial information about each image was entered on a web form by the user to accompany the upload. This provided the museum and the competition's judges with sufficient contextual information.
Using Microsoft Expression Media (formerly iView MediaPro), the museum simply exported details of the highest stage each entrant reached during the judging process, and an appropriate feedback e-mail message could then be generated.
Digital images are large files, usually between 5 and 50 megabytes. Files of this size can take up to 30 minutes to upload across limited consumer bandwidth. At the back end, files were transferred as they uploaded, via FTP, to dedicated LaCie two terabyte storage disks provided by Microsoft. The museum also decided to use AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) to provide the user with feedback on the progress of the image upload. AJAX is a relatively new web development technique to provide page updates while avoiding the need to refresh pages. This was the first use of the technique by the Museum outside of a research context. Combined, these changes prevented user uploads being terminated, negating the need to load images more than once.
Once an image was uploaded, the information about the image was registered in the digital entry database and the user was directed to a page listing images uploaded so far. Here, images could be moved between competition categories or deleted. This area was left open until the competition entry period had closed, so users could log in and update their entries as they wished, giving greater scope for flexibility on behalf of the competition.
Resilient online storage of images
It was crucial that a suitable back-end storage solution was in place to ensure uploaded images were stored safely. Microsoft arranged for a loan to the museum of two LaCie FireWire hard disk packs to provide storage solution for the uploaded images. One LaCie hard disk was attached locally to a museum server. The other was taken to the museum's offsite storage space in Wandsworth, South London, and attached to the network. This disk was set up as a mirror of the local disk, to provide a good level of resilience.
Internet upload speed can be slow for the large digital files produced by top-end digital cameras, so submitting large numbers of images without a broadband connection was not recommended. To ensure a digital entry route was accessible to as many people as possible, the museum advised entrants they could send a CD to the competition office, even if entry had been purchased online. The museum then entered the CD submissions into the competition database. The result was that digital photographers received two entry routes to the competition, but all images and their associated information were now successfully stored in one place.
Judging: Expression Media (formerly iView MediaPro) in action
Once all the images were stored and tagged, the next stage was to find a suitable platform for the all-important viewing and judging of the images. Expression Media (formerly iView MediaPro) was chosen to perform this important function. The museum worked with iView (now owned by Microsoft) over several months to customize the system as a judging tool. It was the perfect solution for viewing and cataloguing images. The museum's database of digital entries provided regular exports of data into the Expression Media (formerly iView MediaPro) catalog, and allowed easy tracking of images that were accepted and rejected at each stage of the judging process. Expression Media (formerly iView MediaPro) functionality also provided the museum with a final catalog of the winners, runners up, and commended images sorted by competition category.
This image management streamlining proved invaluable for the competition organizers at the museum and, with all the information about each entrant stored digitally, the process of providing each photographer with feedback became far simpler. Using Expression Media (formerly iView MediaPro), the museum simply exported details of the highest stage each entrant reached during the judging process and an appropriate feedback e-mail could then be generated.
Working closely with iView (now owned by Microsoft), the museum developed a separate Expression Media (formerly MediaPro) catalog to drive the Web site, which is a core part of the competition deliverable, particularly as it provides access for the competition's international audience.
Similarly, creating the SWPY Web site from winning entries became easier as the whole project was now database driven. Working closely with iView (now owned by Microsoft), the museum developed a separate Expression Media (formerly MediaPro) catalog to drive the Web site, which is a core part of the competition deliverable, particularly as it provides access for the competition's international audience. This catalog accepts image data from the judging process, and allows the addition of extra information specifically for the online exhibition Web site. To generate the Web site, the museum transforms the catalog XML into Microsoft SQL Server tables. From this data and the processed winning images, the museum's Interactive Media department is able to build the Web site with minimal coding, as the database fits an already established model for the site.
Color management made easy
Top-end color management is crucial to judging an internationally renowned photography competition such as SWPY. The maintenance of image integrity and color consistency as an image passes through different media is crucial, and so color profiling was used to ensure this consistency was retained. Entrants were asked to use a specific color profile when saving and submitting digital images. Using the EyeOne color calibration tool produced by GretagMacbeth and recommended by Microsoft, all screens, projectors, and output devices were calibrated and profiled, ensuring both the judges and the public saw each image in the color palette intended by the photographer.
Next steps
While the museum has no immediate plan to stop the submission of traditional slides, entry statistics prove digital entry is now, for the first time, the method of choice for most competition entrants. The digital revolution is well underway among wildlife photographers and with this in mind, the museum expects the need to respond to ever-changing photographic technology will continue to dictate the path this exciting competition takes.
Whilst the challenge of coordinating this great competition continues, the introduction of the digital workflow has updated the competition's processes and greatly improved the user experience for our photographers. The 2006 competition has been judged, and winning images can be seen in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Portfolio 16 published by BBC Books.
