The Big Picture

The Big Picture wanted to create a huge gallery of photos of the West Midlands.
It accepted any subissions: by email, post, or online and was happy to add even just one photo to the album.

A monkey in Trentham Gardens in Stoke

Dave Chesters from Talke Pits dide a few more than that though – he submitted nearly 5,000 photos, nearly every digital picture that he's ever taken!

Man with camera

David has always been interested in photography, but getting a digital camera has made it so much easier.

Looking out at the view on holiday

 "I grew up with a camera in the family as my dad bought one of the first Polaroid cameras with the peel back film, watching them develop was fascinating, but because film and developing was expensive we had to limit taking pictures to holidays and special events. These photos sit in a drawer at my parents' house and are rarely seen."

"My wife Lisa bought me my first digital point and shoot just before my 40th birthday in 2003 as we were going over to Ireland with friends on our motorbikes to watch the Northwest 200 road-race. The digital bug had bitten, as the ability to take hundreds of shots and just delete the ones that did not come out was a real plus, and I only had to print the ones I wanted."

Dave's cat picture is one of the 5,000

Dave decided to improve his skills by enrolling on a BTEC in digital media college at Stoke's Burslem campus.

" I started that September, 3 hours on Monday evenings, for a full year. My tutor was Martin Shakeshaft who covered the 1984 miners strike that my father was involved in, so we got on great. Martin was a real inspiration and I passed my BTEC with a merit and Distinction."

Vehicles

Cars and motorbikes are a theme of Dave's work and he has travelled around the county to showrooms and events, his dream job would be to learn to create car images for magazines, but he will jump at the chance to take photos anywhere.

"I try to get involved in as many different kinds of project as I can.
Last year I was editing pictures in the middle of a field at a show jumping event for Urmston and District Pony club, what a day that was! Taking so many images and editing them to a schedule made the learning curve a bit steep but it was all worth it as my skill levels and confidence around people have increased. The idea is to learn to take fewer photos but cover more of an event."

Dave took his camera to gigs and events.

With such a lot of photos, Dave wasn't sure what to do with them.

 "I had no real use for many of them and so when I saw the item about The Big Picture on Midlands Today it seemed the obvious thing to do, so I set about contacting them to ask if they wanted so many from one person and what format and size they would like them in. I burned all of them to disk and sent them to the freepost address provided."

In so doing, Dave became a record-breaker himself - by the end of the project in July 2008, he'd become the largest single contributor...