Beforethe Crowd

Firstlight Festival: The UK's Only Free Beach Festival

I've been the official photographer for Firstlight Festival since 2019, the very first one. That's six years of watching this thing grow from a bold idea into something genuinely extraordinary. A free, multi-arts festival on the sand at Lowestoft, the most easterly point in the UK, timed around the summer solstice. This year it falls on June 20 and 21, with the dawn celebration landing on the solstice itself, the morning of the 21st.

The Week Before the Festival Opens

The pre-festival week is one of my favourite parts of the job. I'll be out photographing rehearsals, costumes being tried on for the catwalk shows, work experience students and young people helping with the build. It tells a story that the weekend photographs alone can't. You don't get a sense of how much effort goes into two days on the beach unless you've seen what the week before looks like.

Chasing the Sunrise

The sunrise shots are something I always prepare for. I'll be on the beach in the early mornings before the festival opens, looking for the light. Lowestoft is the first place in the UK to see the sun come up and on a clear morning in June, with the tide out and nothing else around, that can be spectacular. You only get one shot at it, so you need to know where to stand and roughly what you're waiting for. It doesn't look like much on the calendar, but those early mornings before the crowds arrive make a real difference to what ends up on the camera.

When the festival opens, it becomes a different kind of job entirely. The Sunlight Stage and the New Dawn Stage both need covering.

Getting backstage to photograph the acts before they go on is always interesting, there's a different energy to someone waiting in the wings than someone mid-set. The crew and the volunteers are a big part of the story too, and that kind of photography matters for the festival's own record of what it does and how it does it.

At full stretch, Firstlight draws over 40,000 people across the weekend. Working through those crowds on sand, getting behind stage, covering as many events and performances as possible, that takes it out of you. I ended up doing 78,000 steps over the 48 hours at the last festival. Good footwear is absolutely not optional.

Why Every Step is Worth It

It takes a few days to properly recover. You're not just on your feet; you're alert the whole time, watching for the moment, watching the light, moving constantly.

But you're also watching families having the best day. Children completely absorbed in something they didn't know they were going to love. People smiling at acts they've never heard of. And this festival is completely free. Nobody paid to be there. That makes every step worth it.

Firstlight festival website