Blakeway: That’s a simple question with a complicated answer. First of all, my early career had absolutely nothing to do with photographing and marketing panoramas. My first job out of college was a sales position with Procter and Gamble. In 1988, I was going through the interview process for sales management positions with several different companies. As I got closer to the point of actually having to say yes or no to several job offers, I started to question whether a company sales position was really what I wanted to do, and whether this type of job was going to make me happy five years down the road. As I thought back over my life to that point, I realized my most fulfilling experiences were connected to the entrepreneurial ventures I had pursued in college. Several of these that had turned out quite profitably and were extremely fun and rewarding. I had applied for a tourist visa to Australia several months prior to these interviews and one day my tourist visa came back approved. It was at that moment that I decided it’s now or never — if I don’t do this now, I most likely won’t do it until I retire, so I packed my bags and headed for Australia. I went to Australia to work — to investigate what we had in the U.S. that might be of interest to the Australians, and what they had that might be marketable in the U.S. I joined every young entrepreneurs club and business club I could find and introduced myself to people everywhere I went. I’d go down to the yacht club and ask people if I could go sailing with them for a day. I really hustled, meeting as many people as I could and discussing all sorts of ventures and new ideas. After about five months, I met a photographer and a designer who had developed an innovative design for a poster using photographs shot from a helicopter. They had produced a panoramic photo of Sydney Harbor that was phenomenal. Neither of these guys knew the first thing about retailing so I proposed helping them take the poster to the marketplace. I immediately went to work building displays in stores and window fronts and we started to sell a lot of the Sydney harbor poster. Then my visa ran out so I sold my share of the business back to these guys in exchange for a couple of hundred posters, and returned to the U.S. I was impressed with our success marketing the Sydney poster and immediately began to search for photographers in the U.S. who could shoot panoramic pictures. I eventually teamed up with a guy in California who was building his own rotational camera and we came up with six or seven photographs we thought were pretty good. I had money in my pocket from Australia, so I found a place on the beach to live, I found a printer, and I started shipping posters out of my garage and selling them out of the trunk of a Honda Prelude. About a year later I moved to Newport Beach, California, and continued shipping posters out of my garage for another year and a half. One of our first panoramas was a Marina Del Rey shot that we promoted with some pr stories that carried the headline: Smile Marina Del Rey, you’ve been chosen as one of four U.S. cities... The story was picked up by several newspapers.

Address: Blakeway Worldwide Panoramas, Inc. 12913 Pioneer Trail, Eden Prairie, MN 55347 U.S.A.
Telephone: (952) 941-9797
Fax: (952) 941-9798
Website: http://www.panoramas.com/