The Mission

It's a beautiful summer day, you're sat in a park in your home town, watching the people go by, discussing festivals with your friends. The good times you've had there - the bands you saw and the food you ate, the strangers you met and wished you'd got a photo of. Perhaps you might remember that disposable camera you found on the floor with only 3 photos taken, that you took for your own, used up, but never got around to developing.

That's what happened to me. It struck me how often you just "find" a disposable camera lying around in a field at a festival. The forces that be must have been smiling on me that day, because it didn't simply stop at idle speculation: from that thought Beautiful Pics was born.

The idea is a simple one. We at Beautiful Pics buy a number of disposable cameras, and then bring them with us to a festival. We then leave them lying around in various strategical points, places where they will be found by other festival goers. Great, but what's the point?

Someone will pick one of these cameras up, take a photo of themselves / their friends / a food stall / a band / an interesting scene, and then leave the camera somewhere else, for someone else. Once the camera is full, the last person delivers that camera to the drop off point, where they will be collected by us at the end of the festival. We then take those camera home with us, process them, and put them on this website for everyone to see.

We hope to build a feel of the entire festival, as seen through the festival goers eyes - not the press, not one person, but as many different people as possible!

The cameras will be numbered, have instructions and the web-address of this site printed on them, meaning that if you make a note of your camera number, you can come on here and see who else got hold of the same camera as you, wouldn't you be at least a little curious? We know we would be! Or maybe you didn't get to the festival but you want to see what it was like? Come here! Comment on the photos, rate the photos, let us know you were in that photo, you never know, you may not have found a camera, but you may have had your photo taken...

One word: satisfaction. We want this to work. We want to create a new way of documenting festivals. We're not going to ask for money, we're not going to charge you to view the photos, and we're not going to ask you for donations.

We are going to pay for the cameras and developing ourselves, we are hosting this ourselves, and we're doing this because we want to.

We know that some people at the festivals might simply keep the cameras they find, and use it themselves. We hope that they wont, but somebody's bound to. But hopefully most people will feel the vibe, get involved, and play the game with us! Some cameras might just get completely lost, nevermind. Some people might forget to drop a camera off. Those people might come on here, and decide they want to send the camera in. We will send those people envelopes with envelopes inside, postage paid, to get those cameras back! It's going to be fun!

We have none yet. This is still an untried idea. Have some photos of other festivals. All the photos on this page were taken by our good friend John Ashby