Keith Robertson • Panoramic Photographer

Background and general information about me

About Me


Hi, I'm Keith Robertson. Born and bred in North Wales. I've done many different things over the years. Too many to list here I guess.

I used to live to climb with a super bunch of people. We are all still good mates, those who keep in touch anyway. Many of us have moved onto other things. Nowadays I try and ride a road-bike, a lot, especially abroad in exotic (ie 'warm') locations, as well as some serious / committing expedition style sea-kayaking from time to time. Retirement is here now, so may have time to start climbing again.

I've accidentally noticed, fairly recently (!), all I ever do are so-called 'Silent Sports'. Loads of very life-threatening commitment; but no crowds, gravity, petrol or cheering. Very very simple and absolutely great.

To pay the bills in the past I found myself working for a long time in IT and government funded business support. A really fantastic bunch of people, totally motivated in doing their best for Wales for all the right reasons.

When Apple introduced some pioneering and quite nice tools to create Quicktime Virtual Reality, QTVR, images many years ago I started to play around with cameras and software. In those days film was the only way to go. Digital cameras didn't really exist at the time. I was very excited in stitching the scanned images into 360° cylinders to interact with on a computer screen.

Looking back now it was all so primitive. All low resolution and no real way of sharing it with anyone as the internet was all working on analogue modems. You had to keep the file size really small and no-one else could see the great stuff I could on my own computer screen.

I found it very stimulating, I could see where it could go, though very slowly at the time…

Today it's all so different. Massive files aren't an issue, quality can be very good, sharing is easy.

I still really enjoy the creative process of capturing high quality full 360° spherical images of remote places that mean something meaningful to me.

Funnily enough, I have no interest in Bucket-List locations, sadly, very often, full of wealthy, noisy tourists with very short attention spans.

A growing side interest is working with cutting edge software to display and share these images as a group of themed images.

So, I'm still active trying to produce super high quality images, the best I can with normal kit, of places that I'm interested in.

What's really new is filing the images on Google's servers so that when I'm no longer around the images will live on. An issue that's becoming more prevalent over time. How does society archive for posterity some of the digital material created non-stop at the moment?

Twitter
I find Twitter very useful as a news-feed on areas of interest to me, and I post occasionally.

My user name is @KeithRobertson



Strava
Mainly a record of my bike rides, but I'm tending to be a little 'incognito' at present:


Flickr Photostream
I like to post albums photos from my travels on Flickr for friends and family to see:

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