Festival Photo Ideas, Hour by Hour
Everyone comes back from a festival with the same photograph: a distant stage, a wall of raised arms, a band too small to identify. It is the one image the day guarantees, and the one nobody looks at twice.
The hourly prompts below deliberately point away from the stage - at the queue, the tent, the mud, the food at an unreasonable hour. Split them across the group and you get a record of the weekend rather than a record of the lineup.
How to run it
- Length
- 12 hours · 12 photos
- Start it
- At the car park, wristband not on yet.
The shot list
- 1
The walk in
Loaded up, from behind. Everything you are carrying.
- 2
Wristband
On the wrist, being fastened. Close and badly lit is fine.
- 3
Tent city
Your tent in the context of four hundred others.
- 4
The first act nobody knows
The small stage at 2 p.m. with eleven people watching.
- 5
The ground
Straight down. Grass, mud, cups, whatever it has become.
- 6
The queue
Bar, toilet, food. Shoot the length of it.
- 7
The group, seated
Everyone on the ground at once, from standing height.
- 8
Crowd from behind
Backs of heads, stage tiny in the distance. This is the honest version.
- 9
Sunset over the field
Whatever direction it happens in. One frame.
- 10
Lights on faces
Your friends, lit by the stage. Not the stage itself.
- 11
Food at an unreasonable hour
Chips, noodles, whatever. In hand, near midnight.
- 12
The walk back
Torch on, tent row, everyone quiet.
Three things worth knowing
- Battery is the whole game. Assign the late hours to whoever brought the biggest power bank.
- Signal is unusable at peak. Shoot on the hour and let uploads clear overnight.
- For a three-day festival, run one Sway per day. A single one cannot stretch past 24 hours.
Run this list with Sway
Start a Sway for these hours, send the people you are with its link and follow the list hour by hour. Everyone gets one shot per hour, and when it ends the hours come back as a single split-screen video.