archeryimages.net

Slideshow

Good news! The ai gallery system update is now finished and the gallery should be fully working. I double-checked all functions and was not able to locate any problems. Even though, if you can find any bugs, please give me a short note about it.

But what has changed? There are a few new features now available in the ai gallery. At first, I enabled picture ratings. I am not sure if this is a necessary feature which is why it never made it in the actual gallery, but I like to try it and see if it is useful.

The second thing is a slideshow. If you have a picture in detail-mode there is a button at the top left of the picture where you can set a delay for the slideshow in seconds and start it. So easy, so good. Hope you enjoy this one!

And last but not least, there is a fancy new e-card feature. You can now send ecards by clicking the envelope that is shown in detail-mode as well as in the overview. Please notice that the gallery sends html-emails with the picture in it. This might cause problems with some providers that only accept text-emails but it makes people able to view the ecard offline as long as they are using software like Mozilla Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook.

I guess that’s it so far. Feel free to use what is new to the gallery, I really hope you enjoy it. Don’t hesitate to comment or mail me if you like to give your opinion about that.

There is still a little bit more to come in the future… you will see.

Dear Visitors! Today I will give the ai gallery an extensive makeover. This might cause downtimes and disfunctions in the next few hours. I will try to make it as short as possible and hope you excuse all the inconveniences.

Stay tuned!

Power in Numbers – If you google that phrase, wikipedia will teach you that it is the name of the third album of the alternative hip-hop group “Jurassic 5″. Seriously, this has nothing to do with archery, but this album title leapt into my mind when I thought about today’s blog post. Because basically, it is about numbers.

Why that? Yesterday, I published pictures of the 2nd leg of the European Junior Cup 2009 held in Sarzana, Italy. Mr. Riccardo Cafagno, president of the Archery Club of Sarzana gave me permission after a short request and made me able to provide these pictures even after the original event-driven website www.archeryjuniorcup-sarzana2009.com will be closed.

With that, there are now more than 30,000 pictures online covering an enormous amount of 60 different international competitions.

But this is not the only threshold that has been crossed lately. A few days ago, archeryimages had it’s 100,000th visitor. This is nice to see and it’s good that this website seems to be helpful or interesting for a lot of people. If you are still with me, these data seem not to be boring enough. So here is more:

The 30,000 pictures are organized in 400 categories in the gallery and have been viewed 1,3 million times by now. This month I already had visitors from more than 40 countries, including Trinidad & Tobago, the Seychelles, Saudi Arabia and Singapore. The most watched pictures in the gallery are those of the arrows hitting a waterfilled balloon, which have been watched 18,000 times as I wrote last week. The oldest pictures are from 1991, the newest ones from September 2009.

So, what to say? It is nice to see this website grow and I like to carry on with it. I got a lot of different feedback in the past and I am always happy about it. You are always invited to give me your opinion about this site, to complain or say what else you have to say. I am still happy about people giving me a note if they are able to provide pictures that are missing in the ai gallery. For example, photos of the Olympic Games 2000 in Sydney and the Games before are missing to this day although they definitely would be interesting.

I am currently developing some new fancy features for archeryimages that I can hopefully present you within the next weeks, but if you have ideas, feel free to let me know.

Hm… and what is the conclusion of this post? I am not sure, but I guess it simply is: Stay tuned!

In December it was 2 years since I uploaded slow motion pictures of the very moment arrows hit waterfilled balloons. These pictures were shot by the german photographer Stefan Grimm and they are still among my favorites when it comes to the beauty of archery. The gallery statistics show me that most of you certainly think the same because these 5 pictures have been viewed nearly 18,000 times within the time they are online and with that, they are the most viewed pictures of all around here.

But archery in general is an interesting sport to show in slow motion. Caused by the fracture of a second that decides about a perfect in-death-center ten or lousy 7 points in archery, it is always nice to see what is actually going on in this crucial instant of time. As men is not able to see it, people in archery around the world have put effort in slow motion videos over and over again. One of the most famous footage was produced by Werner Beiter whose videos from the movie “Der Weg ins Zentrum” (The way to center) are still available for download. In 1997, he opened the “Werner & Iris Center” in Dauchingen, Germany where top athletes from all over the world have the possibility to practise and improve their shooting with the help of slow motion video. The visitor gallery of the “Werner & Iris Center” is basically a who’s is who of international archery and shows how important slow motion video footage is for high-level archery.

Some days ago I found nice slow motion videos made by former U.S. Olympic Archery Team Coach Lloyd Brown at youtube. He also specialised in high speed video analysis and was not just able to produce this footage under “laboratory conditions” but live, at the practise field during the Archery World Championships 2007 in Leipzig. These videos show archers like Natalia Valeeva of Italy or Sung-Hyun Park of Korea and are awesome shots:

http://www.archeryimages.net/gallery/index.php?action=pictures&cid=375

To present you one example, here is a video showing Natalia Valeeva:

This blog post is inspired by a touching video on YouTube that I found via Twitter a few days ago. It shows a 27 years old man shooting a Bear Compound Bow at an indoor archery range. To this point, there is nothing special with that, except the fact that this guy has no arms!

Archery is a very open sport when it comes to disabled persons. As far as I know, it is the only Olympic Sport where disabled persons can (successfully) compete with “normal” athletes. This is valid for physically disabled persons as well as for mentally disabled ones. A good example for such a disabled athlete is the German Mario Oehme, who won the Paralympic Games 1996 and 2004. He has been in a wheelchair after a mining accident in the 1980s and is in the German Paralympic National Team since 1993. But he is one of the archers that is actually able to compete against non-disabled archers and defeat them on a very high level. He proved that on several German Championships in the past.

Even though those positive examples can be role models for others, it should not distract us from the fact that disabled archers have often a lot of problems to struggle with. Archers in wheelchairs are quite common nowadays, but some archers have to deal with more difficult handicaps like blindness or absent extremities either from birth defects or accidents. There are some good examples of how these people deal with their handicap and doing archery anyway. These pictures are taken at the World Archery Para Championships 2009 in Nymburk (CZE):

Finally, the video of the armless archer. In my opinion, it is an extreme example of what is possible if there is a will. I have never seen somebody doing archery with a comparable handicap and moreover, this guy here is doing quite good.

Edit: Yesterday, at January 12th, Andrew Leibs published a good article called “Archery for the Blind”. If you are interested in such things and if you want to learn more about the possibilities for disabled persons to do archery, this might be a good start for you:

http://accessibletravel.suite101.com/article.cfm/archery_for_the_blind