The Big Picture - A huge photography project in the West Midlands

It’s a project aimed at making the biggest photot ‘album’ the West Midlands has ever seen, and if that brings together over 100,000 images then they will be made into a World Record-breaking photo montage.

It’s an Arts Council project being run by Audiences Central, with some big support from the BBC - TV, Radio, Showcasing on Where I Live and so on; as well as sponsorship from Jessops (who have goodies) and Travel West Midlands.

I’ve been building the site for the last two months (I know - I’ve kept it quiet) and under the hood are some things that I’m very proud of indeed, but I’ll keep the techy details for later.

(For the geeks it’s a Wordpress, Flickr, GoogleMaps, Facebook, Flash, Processing, XHTML, XML, AJAX, ActionScript, REST, PHP, MySQL, Java, Quicktime mashupathon - phew!)

For now - we’re looking for photos. Specifically your photos.

This isn’t just about ‘arty’, ‘professional’ or ‘exceptional’ images. What we’d like to do is capture a snapshot of the whole of the West Midlands at the beginning of 2008. That’s photos of people, places, things that make you proud, things that really interest you, and so on.

This is running for the next six months, with events at locations all across the wider West Midlands - Birmingham, Black Country, Coventry & Warwickshire, Hereford & Worcester, Shropshire, Stoke & Staffordshire.

So for now - get adding a photo!