 |
| Green
Sea Turtle, Chelonia
mydas, being cleaned by surgeonfish
or tangs, Zebrasoma
flavescens and Ctenochaetus
strigosus, Hawaii, Pacific Ocean. |
Image
#: 001957 |
|
|
Company
History
1985 - Doug
Perrine, an up-and-coming marine wildlife photographer,
founds Innerspace Visions to
represent his photos.
1986 - The company expands
to represent a few other photographers specializing in
photos of elasmobranchs (sharks, rays,
and chimaeras)
and cetaceans (whales, dolphins,
and porpoises).
1986-1997 - Doug travels around
the world building his stock photo files and taking on more
photographers. There are about 25 photographers represented, Charity
Beck, the office manager, moves on to pursue other interests. Linda
Nolan takes her place and manages Doug’s office while
he is traveling
1997 - Masa
Ushioda is hired in February in Miami to help take
the company off the typewriter and onto the computer; the
switch is made from PC to Mac. The company moves from Miami
to Kona on the Big
Island of Hawaii. Linda does not make the move, but
Masa does. Susan
Dabritz is hired in June in Hawaii.
1999 - The company begins expanding
to take fish and marine
invertebrate photos from photographers, adding to the elasmobranch and cetacean photos
previously accepted. Doug travels extensively and hands the
day-to-day operations of the office over to Masa and Sue.
Workload gets too big for them to handle, and Tamara Dormier joins
the team. Soon after, Dave Kearnes is hired to make
custom dupe slides.
2000 - More photographers are
represented by Innerspace Visions.
The library expands to encompass all matters related to the
ocean, including sea
birds and polar
bears.
2001 - SeaPics.com is
formed and we slowly begin to develop our website. We start
scanning, cataloguing and bar coding our slides.
2002 - Doug and Masa buy their
first digital cameras. More and more submissions are being
done using online digital lightboxes. Photographers are beginning
to submit images on CDs instead of slides. The business focus
shifts from slide submissions to digital, and the duping
department is shut down. All emphasis is based upon the website.
2003 - Sue purchases the company
from Doug and the company moves out of the downstairs of
Doug’s house to an office building. Masa and Tamara makew
the move with Sue, and Doug becomes an employee of the company
whose focus is recruiting photographers around the world.
The company name becomes SeaPics.com and
a new logo is created in October by Sue's sister, Katherine
Zwick. 99% of the business is done online and 95% of
incoming photographers submissions are on CD-ROM or DVD.
Over 200 photographers are now represented.
2004 – SeaPics.com expands
and starts accepting freshwater
marine life, waterfalls,
lakes, rivers, and swamps. We also expand our Arctic and Antarctica coverage
to include all species, not only marine life. We now have
moose, reindeer, foxes, hares, ptarmigan, many bear species,
along with great coverage of native people and, of course,
marine life from these regions.
2005 – We start to accept water
sports images such as boat racing, water skiing, wake boarding,
canoeing, kayaking, surfing, snorkeling, boogie boarding,
sailing, sport fishing, fly fishing, spear fishing, etc.
We also expand our coastal coverage of harbors, lighthouses,
beaches, commercial shipping ports, cities along the water,
and coastal development.
2006 – Tamara Dormier leaves
the company to pursue a different career path. Lynn
Webber is hired as our in-house Accounts Manager and
eventually takes over the position of Office Manager. Lynn
is responsible for our great customer service. Later that
year Christine Sheppard joins
us as our Photographer’s Liaison, quickly taking over the
queries of all our photographers and getting their images
into our database and on our website.
2007 – Kevin
Miller joins us to help process images, proof our website
and write species fact sheets for us. Our new website goes
live in July of this year. We open our first art gallery
in the foyer of our office building. SeaPics
JAPAN, Inc. <http://seapics.co.jp> opens
and is run by one of our contributing photographer, Makoto
Hirose in Japan. We are expanding our image database
rapidly and now have more than 80,000 images online.
If you come to Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii, please
give us a call and stop by for a cup of Kona coffee. Aloha. |
