archeryimages.net

Yeah, who is behind this site? I thought, that might be an interesting question for some of you. And that is why I would like to say a few words about myself.

Archeryimages is not a company, it’s not an association and not a bunch of media professionals who are trying to code some kind of fancy Web 2.0 application that is bought by google next year. Actually, it’s just me. My name is Tilman Bremer and I am a 22 years old keen archer living in Aachen, Germany. I am doing archery now for more than half of my live, to be exact for 13 years. I just had my 9th birthday when I first tried archery in a local archery club. My parents were on a search for a sport for me and since I was not interested in sports that everybody does we gave archery a try.

Since then I am shooting Recurve. I started with a wooden Samick Mind 10, a bow that is (to my surprise) still being produced. After a few years I switched to solid material with Hoyt’s Gold Medalist. I had this bow for years and shot thousands and thousands of arrows with it. I competed in German Championships and set personal records that lasted long after my Gold Medalist time. All in all, I really loved this bow. But as all good things must come to an end, I traded it in for a Hoyt Nexus in 2006. So, still Hoyt but no longer this legend of a bow.

After I finished school in 2007 I started studying mechanical engineering at the RWTH Aachen which I will do until the year 2013, if everything goes well. My studies left very little time for archery the first year, which is why I did not compete in German Championships in 2009 and my results suffered in the Bundesliga as well as in the regional competitions I participated in. But as the stress now cools down a little bit, I hope that I can practice harder and make up the leeway in the next time.

I published so many pictures of other archers on this site, I guess it’s only fair to show me shooting as well. So, here you are:

Why this site?

Good question as well, why did I set up this website? It was in April of 2006 when the Field Hockey World Championships were held in Mönchengladbach, Germany. At this time I attended school in that city and it happened that I heard of a website called www.hockeyimage.net while visiting one of the hockey games. Even though it is a private website of a German photographer and not exactly the same like archeryimages, I instantly thought “why isn’t there something like that for archery?”. Back then, the situation in the Internet was confusing. The FITA photographers had private websites where you could find the pictures they made. The most important website was www.dutchtarget.com by FITA photographer Dean Alberga (Netherlands) but there are other private websites that are quite comprehensive in internatioal archery, such as www.jdgitton.com (Jean-Denis Gitton, France) and www.timorantanen.com (Timo Rantanen, Finland).  Besides that, event-driven websites hosted picture and video material in many different qualities, amounts and varying availabilities. All in all it was not a pleasure to get pictures of current competitions and it was even less satisfying when searching for competitions that have been hold years before.

So I thought of a website that is in a neutral position and where you can find all pictures of international events at one place. I didn’t vacillate and started working. To make a long story short, in May 2006 I registered the domain and set up archeryimages.net.

What I am currently trying to do is to contribute to the promotion of archery. Archery is one of the less popular sports. It’s a fact, and everbody knows that. Even though, it is important to get as much presence in the media as possible to make people get interested in the sport and keep it alive. Regarding that, we were dependent on the established media like newspaper and TV for a long time. But with the global spread of the Internet, archery now has the great possibility to promote itself worldwide in no time and with a fraction of the investment. If I am honest, I think we really were a little late there. The FITA somehow underestimated the “power of the net” and started using it quite late. But this changed for good. The FITA has now set up their own photo gallery, is using Twitter and Facebook, and has an excellent YouTube Channel. I am trying to help with archeryimages.net, I am trying to provide a nice looking website with a good usability that makes it a pleasure to “discover the fascination of archery” for newbies and that makes it the same pleasure for archery geeks to get input about world archery. I would like to show archery as a modern and open minded sport that is competitive, because I think these adjectives actually fits for archery.