Sporting Images Australia
Sporting Images began it’s origins in Brisbane in 1992 in a small cramped apartment in Melton Rd Nundah, with its sole purpose on supplyng 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 45 000 image 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.
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 accreditation for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics 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, and by 1998 they were supplying a large list of National and International magazines.
Michael Broadbent’s company Broad Images came on board in 1996 to cover the team photography and between the two companies, they were also able to cover local events with a full service not seen before in Queensland.
Duane spent a lot of this period covering action photography at national and international events for the library and publications, with the 4 years before the next Olympics being a very busy time for the agency. 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, Jonathan 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.
By 2001, both Sporting Images (Action photography) and Broad Images (Team photography) 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. Sporting Images maintained its 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.
In 2008 Michael Broadbent (Broad Images) retired from team photography and Sporting Images restructured, replacing its team photography supplier. Duane also gained accreditation for his fourth Olympics in Beijing and again provided coverage for our editorial clients, and also won the Sports Photo Of The Year at the 2008 International Aperture Awards
Back to Main Blog Page