Our new blog is now available for sports photographers, event organisers and others who are interested in our service. Our photographers and staff will be regularly submitting articles on how they have covered events, and other interesting news stories about Sporting Images event coverage.

Blog Archives:

Sporting Images have been awarded photographic accreditation for the forthcoming Beijing Olympics, and will again be providing a comprehensive service to its editorial clients from a variety of sports. Our head photographer Duane Hart will be covering his fourth Olympics and will be posting details of his coverage at his Myspace blog
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Helen and Duane recently provided coverage of the Queensland School Sport 12yrs & Under Rugby League Championships in Chinchilla, photographing the first 4 days of action, with the images being available to view and purchase in the display van. As with all country Queensland events, the hospitality was superb the food great and the weather stayed fine. We also managed to cover some local U16 and over 35 Games Chinchilla Bulldog games on the Saturday evening. Thanks go to Phil Coleman and the team at South West School Sport who hosted such a wonderful the event. All photos went up on our website every evening and can be viewed in our league archives
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The May 2008 issue of top US magazine Rangefinder, has an interview with SIA photographer Duane Hart. The article discusses how Duane started out in Sports photography and how his business has evolved to stay at the forefront of the Sports Photography event selling market in Australia over the last 15 years.
Duanes article can now be viewed by clicking these links: Page1 – Page2 – —————————————————————————————————————————

XBlades National Touch League – Coffs Harbour

Sporting Images recently provided our annual action and team photography service at the XBlades National Touch League in Coffs Harbour on 12th-15th March, and this marks the 12th year of our coverage of this event.
Michael and Glen with help from tech Katelyn photographed all the teams in the first 2 days – and had all 1100 laminated and named team photos back to the participants by day 3.
Duane and Glen photographed over 6500 action photos of as many teams as possible over the 4 days using their Canon Mk3 Cameras and 400 2.8 lenses, and these are now available in our NTL Archives
With the event being condensed to 4 days this year and with 10 fields going at once it was not possible to photograph all teams or participants however they managed to photograph most teams in action.

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Selected images from SIA photographer Duane Hart’s Portfolio can now be purchased as framed artwork for your wall or gift cards. Click here to view.
Duane has also just been voted as a top 10 finalist in the recent Australias Top Photographers Competition
and also now has a Myspace page

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Queensland Swimming Championships
Sporting Images recently provided photographic coverage of the Queensland Swimming Championships at Chandler, in our first year of coverage of this event. Over 37 000 images were taken over the seven days of competition and we had a team of 7 working to make the images available on our website. Michael, Duane Lucas and Wayne photographed the event with Katelyn our busy Tech, and Helen and Tania worked on getting all the images available on the website as soon as possible. Go To Photos

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The photographers using the Canon Mk3 cameras shot at 3200 asa 1000th at 2.8 with auto white balance, and the Mk 2 photographers shot at 1600 asa 500th at 2.8. All used 400 2.8 lenses for the action. We also had a new Superposter product on display at the event and now with the new Canon Mk3 cameras and the sharpness and file size of the images being taken, we can now produce large 30×20” posters on supergloss archival paper.
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Tom Ang’s new book “Digital Photography Masterclass” by UK publisher DK Publishing, is due for release in May 2008. One of the photographers featured in the book is Sporting Images photographer Duane Hart, and he is interviewed about his photography and it features a selection of his recent work. To view the book and order an advanced copy go to the Publishers website – The first 2 pages of Duanes article can now be viewed in pdf format by clicking here Page1 – Page2
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Noosa Triathlon
Sporting Images covered the recent Noosa Triathlon with 5 photographers, in our second year of coverage of this event. Duane and Michael were out on the cycling course with the 400 2.8 lenses on the long climb up Gynther Drive getting as many cyclists as they could as they streamed past.
Shane had the best view of the day being positioned on top of the finish arch getting some superb wide angles of the finish, and Delwyn (300 f4) and Lucas (400 f2.8) shot the run to the finish photos.
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With no arm numbers this year the identification of the athletes was reliant on front showing bib and helmet numbers, and this proved difficult as quite a few didnt have their number showing. It has taken quite a while for the office staff to sort all the 10500 unknown images into their event and folders. Over 15 000 images were able to be identified and all are now available to view .
Go To Photos

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2007 Queensland Secondary Schools Athletics Championships
Sporting Images had 4 photographers covering this well organised event, and over 25 000 images were taken over the 4 days. We all used our Canon Mk3 Cameras and 400 2.8 lenses and Duane had a remote Mk2 camera with a 17-35 lense in place for the steeplechase again this year.
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Having 4 camera angles for the 100m finals was a first – and many of the track finals had 2-3 cameras on the event including most finishes.
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It took our office staff over 2 weeks to sort all 25 000 images into the 350 events that were on, and the images are all now available to view.
Go To Photos
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Queensland Long Course Swimming Championships by Lucas Wroe.
Sporting Images had a strong presence at Chandler Aquatic Center recently, with coverage by, Duane Hart, Michael Marsdon, Glen Eaton and Lucas Wroe. Duane and Mike used the new Canon Mk III camera, while Glen and I used the Mk II. An interesting white balance comparison can be made between the cameras. Duane shot Auto WB Mk III, Glen shot Auto WB Mk II and I shot a custom WB Mk II. Glen’s proving to be sometimes neutral, often cool to cool/magenta or green. The surprise package was the Duane’s Mk III, producing images that were almost always neural or with a marginal cast. Over 9600 images were taken over the 2 days
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We all shot with a 400m f2.8, with Glen and I added a 2x Tele to shoot tight portraits from higher in the stands. Mike also tested out his new fisheye lens to good effect. Average exposure used for the first day was 1/320th f2.8 1600asa. The Mk III shooting brilliantly at 3200asa. On the second day of competition, the arena turned out to be a stop brighter.———————————————————————————————————————-

A book has also been produced with some of the best images from Duane’s work over the last 15 years. The book is updated with the latest photos from his collection. To see the latest copy click on the book below:
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Wet and Wild Gold Coast Gymnastics Carnival
Lucas and Duane covered the recent Wet and Wild Gold Coast Gymnastics National Club Carnival, and it was our fifth year of coverage of this well organised event.
Duane used his new Mk 3 Canon with a 200 1.8 lense for the beam and the 400 2.8 for the portraits, and Lucas had a 400 2.8 and a Mk 2 from the back of the stand photographing mainly the floor routine on Day 1 and 3.

For the mk 3 Duane shot 1600 asa during the day and 3200 asa in the evening, with the new Canon camera once again proved its worth with the quality of the images in a very dimly lit venue. It also made it a lot easier to get a lot of the leaps on the floor – with the auto-focus tracking each jump as a 10 frame per second sequence, and all images were pin sharp.
Over 12 000 images were taken over the 4 days and with Day 1 being a marathon 13 hour shoot over the 5 sessions, over 5500 images were taken on day 1 alone. The images are now all up on the website as we have sorted the images into their clubs and event folders, and thanks go to all the competitors and organisers. Go To Photos

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BCPA Workshop.
Broad Images photographer Michael Broadbent recently hosted a sports photography workshop organised through the Brisbane College of Photography.
The 9 students spent the morning in the classroom discussing the common techniques of sports photography & equipment choices. After a further chat over lunch the students put in to practice some of the theory discussed in the classroom and tested some of the best equipment Canon Australia has to offer.
The workshop was proudly supported by Canon Australia , Crumpler Bags, Lexar, Frontier Digital Professional Lab & Coffs Harbour Camera House. A big thank you to all these supporters, the students certainly appreciated the products and other goodies.
For more information regarding courses offered by the college please check out www.bcpa.com.au
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Maranoa Zones Little Athletics Championships – Goondiwindi by Duane Hart
A very enjoyable and rewarding 2 days photographing over 80 competitors in Goondiwindi for the Maranoa Zones Little Athletics Carnival. I drove across after covering 2 days at the U18 Touch Nationals at Coffs Harbour from Grafton up the Gibraltor Range and through Glen Innes , Inverell and taking in the beautiful scenery on the way to Goondiwindi.
Competitors from Dirranbandi, Goondiwindi, Texas, Mitchell, St George and Tara were competing, and I always enjoy traveling out to this event and the hospitality of the organisers and friendly and eager competitors always makes it a very enjoyable photographic assignment.
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I have covered this event for the last 5 years and while there may not be as many competitors or photo orders as other events we cover, I rate it as one of the highlights of the year. The new multimedia van was very well received, and the competitors enjoyed watching their photos come up on the big screen.

For the sports photographers out there – I covered this primarily with my 400 2.8 and the new Canon Mk3 camera worked well all weekend. The new camera certainly made it easier and being able to shoot 10 frames a second backlit meant I could get almost all competitors in the sprint and hurdle races as they raced past.
Our team at Sporting Images always enjoy covering country events and in the last few months we have covered events in Mt Isa, Rockhampton, Mackay, Bundaberg and Maryborough, and there are just as many opportunities for good photos at these events as at any major events. Backgrounds are always good and the athletes and organisers are always friendly and courteous and appreciate our professional coverage of these events.—————————————————————————————————————————

For those interested in Sports Photography, there is a new book that has just been released in the USA. Compiled by local Queensland editor and photographer Peter Skinner, and featuring the some of the best work of Sporting Images photographer Duane Hart. The book is now available to review and purchase at the following webpage

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2004 Athens Olympics – by Duane Hart

I travelled to these Games with my good friend Delly Carr, staying in an apartment in a residential part of Athens. Some of the highlights included hearing the New Zealand Anthem at an Olympics when 2 Kiwi athletes won Gold and Silver in the Triathlon, and the swimming where the Australian athletes did so well.
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The 100m Mens final from side on was an image I had always wanted to do and it took a lot of planning and luck to get the image just before the moving TV camera traveling parallel with the athletes came past. I shot it at the 70m mark on my Canon 10d with my trusty 200 1.8 lens hand-held at 1000asa f8 at 250th. Also the Australian mens hockey grand final was a great event to photograph as they had waited so long for a gold that the emotion and action of the final made for great images.
The best positions are now virtually impossible to get into unless you are with the Worlds top few agencies, however I managed to gain access to the roof positions for the water polo, and softball. This however also meant scaling a 50 ft ladder and photographing straight down from the top of the roof, and I’m not good with heights.
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With only a small client base to cover these games it meant I could spent a lot of time with slow shutter speeds and different camera angles and take my time in waiting for the great shot instead of just a good one. This is something I cannot normally do with the junior sport photography I normally cover.
The above synchronised diving image (my daughter calls this my dinosaur-eye photo) was shot with my Canon 10d with a 400 2.8 lens at 1600asa f32 at 15thsec.
After the games Delly and I spent 4 days on the Greek Island of Hydra on a well needed break after 3 weeks of enjoyable but exhausting work.
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1996 Atlanta Olympics – from Duane Harts 2007 Portfolio Book

The Atlanta Games were my first Olympics, and I had been fortunate to gain accreditation through a number of national sporting groups that had used my services including Athletics Australia and Hockey Australia.
By 1996 my agency Sporting Images was starting to supply a large number of national and international magazines, however I was still using an old manual focus 300 2.8 Tamron lense and I felt with the right equipment I could improve my photography.So while at the games I purchased my first auto focus lense (Canon EOS 200 1.8 lense) and an EOS 1N camera .Michael Johnson’s now famous World 200m record was photographed full frame using a hand held EF 200 1.8 lense. I had photographed Michael many times at previous World Championship events, and he always celebrated with his arms out, so I got into position 8 hours before the race to get the scoreboard in the background. Once in position I couldn’t move and had to wait in one spot until the final later that evening. There were around 400 professionals at the stadium by the time the race started but I was there for only one photo in the best position I could have and I knew if he ran a world record it would be something special. When he finished and the time flashed up on the scoreboard, there was a brief pause when the crowd and anyone who knew anything about athletics realised the achievement, and then the roar of the crowd. It was only a split second, but it will remain with me forever as a highlight.

I entered the AIPP Awards in 1996 with images from my coverage of the Olympics and won the Australian Editorial Photographer Of The Year at the AIPP 1996 awards night. It provided national coverage for me and the agency and a few publications profiled myself and the agency in a few national photography and sporting magazines.
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-Extract from the 2007 Duane Hart portfolio Book
History of Sporting Images Australia.
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Duane Hart started the Sporting Images Photo Agency and Library with his partner Helen after arriving in Brisbane in 1992 with only 2 back-packs and a passion for sports photography. The first office was in a small cramped apartment in Melton Rd Nundah, and after a few years of long hours and hard work they slowly shaped the agency baseing it on quality sports photography. The office moved to Clayfield in 1994 and images were photographed on negatives and slide film, scanned and added to a comprehensive digital filing system with every image databased. The images were then supplied to a growing list of National magazines and publications on a client searchable database CD (1993) and later an FTP server (1994-95). With the advent of the Internet in Australia in the mid 90’s Sporting Images were one of the first agencies in the World in 1996 to convert their database and make it available to their clients via a database driven website where clients could find their images using keywords to find their images, and by 1998 we had over 45000 images on our keyword searchable website.

Michael Broadbent’s company Broad Images came on board in 1995 to cover all the team photography and between the two companies, they were able to cover local events with a full service not seen before in Queensland. By 1996 Duane was photographing action photography for local teams including the Brisbane Broncos, Queensland Reds Rugby, Bullets Basketball, Brisbane Strikers Soccer and many sporting events on the local calendar. His work was also being used in a growing list of national publications and during this time he gained national recognition photographing for many national teams and organisations including Athletics Australia and Hockey Australia. Duane gained his first highly sought after Olympic Games accreditation in 1996 and covered mainly Athletics and Swimming at this event. The images he managed to capture gained him the 1996 Australian Institute Of Professional Photography(AIPP) Editorial Photographer of the Year award and with it national recognition for the agency.
Duane spent a lot of this period covering action photography at national and international events for the library and publications while Michael worked on building up the local team photography market in Queensland, and the 4 years before the next Olympics was a very busy time for the agency and by 1999 SIA had over 40 national magazines and publications regularly sourcing images from their image library.
The decision was made in 1999 to change direction after 2000 and concentrate on the local event market as the editorial market in Australia was changing and with the new digital revolution in photography about to make an impact and make it a lot easier to photograph such local events for sale to the competitors.

Sporting Images covered their second Olympics in 2000 with Duane Hart, Jonathon Woods as accredited photographers and technician Michael Broadbent. With Australia doing so well in a wide variety of sports it was a busy time photographing all the events for their publishing clients.
The 2000 Sydney Olympics were the last time SIA covered an event using slide (Velvia) and Fuji 800 neg, as at the time the new revolution of digital cameras were not quite up to the quality of the slide film, however by November 2000 they were ready to go fully digital.
SIA purchased their first digital camera (Canon D30) and a display sales van to print and display the photos and with many of the sports never having had photos taken of them with long professional lenses, their service was well received.
Sporting and Broad Images both covered a variety of sports and club events however by 2004 they worked out which events were profitable and which were not – and settled on a group of sports and events with a good profit base, were enjoyable to photograph, and had organisers that were loyal and appreciated their service. They maintained their founding principles of quality and not quantity and continued to only employ photographers who were also passionate about the quality of their photography.

After having the office based in a warehouse in Newstead, Brisbane for 4 years they decided in 2004 to shift it out to Redcliffe and purchased their own office base.
In 2004 Duane covered his third Olympics in Athens, as one of only 4 Australian accredited freelancer photographers, for a small but loyal group of Australian publishers, and his images were once again widely published both nationally and internationally.
The website was by now their primary source of sales and in 2005 it underwent a major reconstruction to a database driven system for a planned move into the Triathlon and Fun Run photography market.

Introduced in 2007, our new on-site multimedia display van is now a popular attraction at events and images can be purchased digitally at the event or afterwards on our website.
Duane also gained accreditation for his fourth Olympics in Beijing in 2008 and will be providing coverage for our editorial clients.
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1991 World Championships of Athletics in Tokyo – Extract from Duane Hart’s 2007 Portfolio Book .
I was living in London at the time, after arriving from New Zealand, and was working as a computer draughtsman for Harrods by day, and training and racing 200m/400m for first division club Belgrave in the evening and weekends. I managed to get photographic accreditation for the World Championships in Tokyo from a good friend and editor Kerry Hill from New Zealand Athlete Magazine (‘typing’ the application out using Letraset stickers and using the bottom of a twink bottle for a company stamp) I flew Aeroflot to Tokyo via Moscow and almost didn’t make it at all as I arrived at Moscow airport on the final day of the 1991 Russian coup, to be greeted by a young soldier with a rifle who asked where we had come from. He then herded us into the terminal and told us he didn’t know what would happen to us. I saw the Russian team waiting in an adjoining terminal and after showing the security my (twink bottle stamped) media credentials, I was on the plane with them to my first World Championships.
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I had just enough money to pay for my accommodation and had to survive 2 weeks in Japan with only $50, and so had exist on the sponsors free snacks, Coke and M and M’s, and noodle soup.
I managed to take some good photos on the 25 rolls of film I took with me (generously provided by Fuji UK) but by day 3, I had run out of film and had to resort to scrounging for dropped rolls of film at the end of each day, underneath the media platform in the moat surrounding the track. I managed to use most of these found rolls of film however when it rained, I couldn’t find any dry film. As would be expected, many of the rolls had already been exposed and dropped before they could be processed, and therefore after I had used them I had some nice double exposed frames of some of my better photos
The Mike Powell World Record photo that got me started in sports photography came about, as a mixture of good luck and preparation, but as Ive since learned in Sports photography sometimes you make your own luck.
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As I loaded another ‘found’ roll of film at the long jump final, everyone was expecting Carl Lewis to win in record time, but I noticed Mike Powell jump a large jump from a 3 step run-up during his warmup and realised he was on for something special. Having trained in athletics for 10 years prior, I had a good understanding of all events and knew most athletes history and techniques.
There were too many other photographers around the pit, so I decided to climb up out of the media pit and into the grandstand with the spectators. As Mike Powell jumped I photographed the sequence and when the distance came up on the board I managed to snap Mikes famous celebration. However I had positioned myself in amongst the USA fans and should have forseen their reaction – As all of them jumped up arms waving. I managed to get 2 frames in as I hand-held the 300 2.8 lens, and somehow missed all the arms and flags waving in front of me. I wasn’t to know it at the time but this event was to change my outlook on my until then hobby.
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I captured many memorable images from these championships, and after the event ended I had to sell some spare photo prints to some of the athletes at the airport to get enough money to pay the departure tax to leave the country. On returning to London I visited a few sporting image libraries, two of which offered me full time work, however my work permit could not be extended, and Helen and I left London for a new life in Australia. I now had a passion about my hobby, and after matching it with some of the best photographers in the world in Tokyo, I knew with good equipment and fresh film, I could continue to improve my photography.

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