My name is Petr Toman and I am a freelance sports photographer.  

I am based in Brno, Czech Republic. At the start of my photography career I was hooked by NFL sports photographers, and wanted to give it a try myself. The opportunity came when my friends created a local team and started to play for Brno Pitbulls. In those days the American football scene in Czech Republic was almost non-existent. Later I would shoot a wide variety of sports events including the UEFA – Europe League Finals, IAAF – Golden Spike, FVBI – Beach Volleyball Grand Slam, American Football European Championship, IBU – Biathlon World Cup, FIS – Cross Country World Cup, EuroHockey Championship and World Championship in volleyball, and many more.

I coordinated distribution of my images with the Czech News Agency (CTK) and Alamy in the UK, which I am still cooperating with on some events.

With the rapidly increasing number of images I immediately identified the need for a DAM (digital asset management) system. Not only to standardise captioning across multiple agencies, but also to enable the ability to search through thousands of images, finding the right athlete when it was needed and to use the images for social media. Everything came together in the new photo agency I founded: World Sports Images.