Multi colour imaging surveys help astronomers to find galaxies and clusters,and to gain insights on their physical properties and evolution.

In this thesis, I present the Stockholm VIMOS Supernova Survey (SVISS), where the ELAIS-S field was observed with VIMOS UBVRI broad-band optical bands over a period of 5 years. The main goal of SVISS is to determine supernova rates at redshifts from z~0.1-1, but the wealth of data enable us to study also galaxy evolution and the supernovae hosts galaxies. I describe the work done to create a deep photometric catalogue of galaxies in the field,including computations of survey completeness and galaxy number counts. In addition I describehow we use colour criteria to select high redshift galaxy candidates (so called Lyman Break Galaxies).Photometric redshifts have been obtained for most galaxies in the field using a template-fitting method. I briefly describe this method and present the resulting redshift distribution.

We have found 16 supernovae in total, 7 thermonuclear supernovae and 9 core collapse, using the difference imaging technique.From their broad band flux and colour evolution of the supernovae, we classified them into core collapse and thermonuclear supernovae, with an internal accuracy of 95%. We compute supernova rates for both types up to redshift of 1, and we show a good agreement with the other determined rates.

We have done studies on the relation between supernovae and host galaxies to try understand the nature of supernovae and their environments.The position of the supernovae within the galaxies, their star formation rate, host galaxy luminosity, among others, have been derived and tested against published results showing a good agreement with results at lower redshifts.