Seeing Chester Through New Eyes

There’s a great Facebook group where locals share photos of our beautiful and evolving city. It’s privacy settings are set to members only so you will have to join.

There are some beautiful photos taken by some very talented local pro and semi-pro photographers, but their posts are mightily outweighed by Cestrians carrying smartphones who capture images that are just as captivating.

As the vast majority of our clients are local to us, we are often asked to use images of famous Chester landmarks in the web sites that we design for them. We find the group a great inspiration for photo ideas, especially when we want to show off the changing face of our city.

In the case of The Ormonde, a guest house on Brook Street, we wanted a photo that showed off Pepper Street, one of the burgeoning quarters where visitors to Chester head for food and a memorable night. The photo would be used on the home page of the new web site design that we were due to release in the New Year of 2022.

Here’s the result.

 

Our photo was taken on the pavement close to the slip road leading to the car park of The Grosvenor and shows light trails of passing traffic in front of Artezzan, Opera and Boujee. The shot was taken fully manually on a tripod-mounted Canon DSLR with a 15 second exposure on Saturday 22nd January 2022.

Time To Update Our Archive Photos Of Chester

We have been using images from our own archive of Chester photos in web, print and video projects we have been engaged on as designers for years, but it’s high time we updated it with a new set of eyes. After all, so much has changed – some planned, but plenty that wasn’t.

We have lost some cherished businesses and familiar names from our historic streets, but we are gradually seeing new ones setting up too. We have the new Northgate Development, barely photographed by anyone yet as the finishing touches are only just being added. We have a new market, and we are seeing some of the original market businesses make the move into their own standalone premises. Chester is evolving.

So we’ve decided that our trusty archive of Chester photos is long overdue a refresh. If you revisit our blog section of our website over the coming weeks and months we’ll share more images from our updated archive.

That said, there will always be a place for photos like this.

 

Our photograph of Chester Cathedral was taken from the railing side of the pavement on St Werburgh Street on a tripod-mounted Canon DSLR with a nine second exposure on Saturday 22nd January 2022.