This is the official Team GB team photograph, the Big Picture! All 541 of Great Britain’s athletes that competed at the London 2012 Olympics. Its a photo montage, shot over six weeks as the athletes picked up their official kit at Loughborogh University. The athletes would arrive in ones or two’s and we organised them on a specially built plinth. Each athlete was then placed in a specific area on the plinth corresponding to their final position in the Big Picture.

When I had the original idea I thought it would be possible to shoot all the athletes in one go or maybe combine two images together.  This final image has over 250 separate images montaged together, it became a massive jigsaw puzzle.

Georgie Gillard and Lucy Ray, my fellow photographers helped with the day to day photography and logistics. Once we had a system in place for captioning and identifying each athlete the hard work was complete. Pictures like this have to be right on the first day, if you make a mistake it will be magnified as each day. The pictures show how the image grew everyday from left to right, we kept the athletes in their sports and  added in pieces of their sports apparatus, ie, the Archer holding a bow and the Chris Hoy holding a bike wheel.

David Cameron visited the preparation camp during the six weeks and asked for a framed print to hang at No10, you can see me handing over the print which now hangs in Downing street!