Last month the National Geographic announced the 7 Best Wild Animal Photos of 2008 which is organized by the Natural History Museum of London and BBC Wildlife Magazine. The black-crested macaque photo you see was the winner in the category "Animal Portraits", photographed by Stefano Unterthiner, which followed a group of the monkeys on Indonesia's Sulawesi island for six weeks, always wearing the same clothes, so they would recognize him.

The overall winner was the beautiful shot of a Snowstorm Leopard, but the sad news is there are "few as 3,500 snow leopards remain in the wild."

Stalking India's Hemis National Park, a snow leopard lives up to its name in U.S. photographer Steve Winter's award-winning National Geographic magazine image.

"This is the hardest story I have ever done because of the altitude and the steepness of the mountains," the U.S. photographer told National Geographic. "At night it was 30 below zero [Fahrenheit]."

Over ten months Winter's 14 "camera traps" shot more than 30,000 frames in pursuit of the endangered cat.

There are more pictures of snow leopards by Winter in this photo gallery, a six minute video about his search to photograph them, and an article. And the winner image:

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