Austrian Future Cup 2024 and DTL Finals 2024

Unfortunately, we have some bad news for gymnastics fans regarding the Austrian Future Cup 2024 and the DTL Finals 2024.

We announced last year that the photos of the Austrian Future Cup 2024 and the DTL Final 2024 would be posted online in the course of the new year. Unfortunately, we didn't manage to do this and have been under massive pressure for a long time now.

We have withstood this pressure for a very long time. Last year, however, we reached the point where this stress had a massive psychological and physical impact: not only did we have considerable self-doubt about our work, which we have been passionately pursuing for almost 20 years, but we also got into financial difficulties and, in dealing with German bureaucracy, we learnt that the knowledge and understanding of even simple business contexts is very poor among authorities in Germany. With this statement, we are explicitly not addressing the financial authorities, as they have mainly supported us as far as they were able. Unfortunately, the topic is too complex to summarise here. It would simply go beyond the scope of this article.

Short form:

Due to health reasons in particular, the work has come to a standstill and could not be completed.

What happens next?

As difficult as it is for us, we have to draw a line at this point. For you, this means that there will be no photos of the Austrian Future Cup 2024 and no photos of the DTL Finals 2024. The new season is just around the corner and starts next week. If we don't want to fall completely behind again and postpone photos for many months, then it simply won't be possible to edit the past photos.

We're also facing difficulties again in 2025 in terms of event dates. From May onwards, there will be a major event practically every weekend. We will have a large number of events coming up again within a very short space of time, which will not allow us to edit all the photos in a timely manner due to time constraints alone.

Of course, this means an additional financial burden for us, because we won't be generating a cent of income from these events for the time being. We have to hope that there will still be sufficient interest in our photos when they are published at a later date. And that this interest is sufficient to generate enough income for us to cover our costs, as we often have to incur considerable costs in advance.

This is another point that many people don't realise:

We rarely receive any payment from organisers or events. Our travelling expenses are also not covered by anyone. We pay everything out of our own pockets. If we don't generate enough income from orders afterwards, we pay on top. We are not rich either, quite the opposite. We live in precarious circumstances, as they say. Despite working full-time.

To cut a long story short:

We won't give up despite the adverse circumstances, because we love what we do too much and are delighted every time we receive an email or feedback that our photos are well received and people are happy with the results of our work. This is very important to us and motivates us.

That's why we're still looking forward to the new season and will once again do our best to satisfy everyone.

Background for interested parties:

By way of background, you should know that processing the photos of a large event lasting two or more days takes around 200-250 hours of work.

The photos have to be sorted by hand. Unfortunately, this is not done automatically. This means that we have to assign each individual photo to the respective athlete and sort them. Once this is done, we have to go through the photos of all the athletes individually and sort out all the photos that are not being used. These are blurred photos or photos that do not meet our requirements, but of course also series photos from an exercise, of which only one or two photos are useful. Then the editing begins. This means that each individual photo is loaded into image editing software and we make various adjustments in the editing process so that the end result looks exactly as you can order it. This is also done by hand for each individual photo.

At peak times, we spend up to 10 hours a day, seven days a week in front of the PC and do practically nothing else but edit photos.