the disposable memory project

We’re very excited to be contributing to 16HOURS, a beautiful independent magazine which we’ve been fans of since it launched.
The theme for Issue 04 is We Are Wild, and as part of our collaboration, 16HOURS have released a number of cameras into the project:

Camera 432: Gold Coast Airport, AUS, 21st Jan
Camera 433: Jupiters Casino, Gold Coast, AUS, 21st Jan
Camera 434: Starbucks Hyde Park, Sydney, 26th Jan
Camera 435: Sydney Olympic Park, AUS, 30th Jan
Camera 436: Bald Hill Lookout, Sydney South Coast, AUS, 28th Jan
Camera 437: Retro Wombat Thrift Store, Thirroul, AUS 29th Jan

We’ll be keeping an eagle eye on these cameras, as they travel around Australia.

So, as part of Kodak’s support for our project at the end of last year, 25 cameras were sent to journalists across Europe.
Some of the recipients didn’t quite understand the project, and we had one camera which returned home completed by an individual, and another camera which came back straight away, but only half complete.

Fortunately, Andrew M very kindly offered to take the camera on, and re-release it, so it made its trip from London, to France, to London, and on to Canada, to restart its story.

Fingers crossed, as it heads on to Jamaica now, we’ll see this camera return home once again at some point soon!

Check out Camera 442 to follow its journey onwards.

Well, this is a first! Camera 441 was released on live television!

Thanks to Owen for featuring the show on his Geekin’ Out slot, and as the host said, this is “Epic”!

Leo Laporte and Chris Marquardt talk about The Disposable Memory Project on The Tech Guy on TWiT.TV

Seek forward to about 53:45, or listen to the whole podcast if you’ve got a spare couple of hours.

Leo was sent Camera 349, which travelled from the US to Antarctica in just a matter of a few weeks.

Chloé very kindly took a picture of the recent article in Phosphore magazine, in France, AND translated the article for us. Amazing!

“The editorial staff loves…

TRAVELER PICTURES

It’s a crazy, unnecessary and great idea: leaving disposable cameras around the word , hoping, then, to recover the pictures of their journey. Since 2008, “The Disposable Memory Project” send cameras on a trip, like so many bottles in the see.
On www.disposablememoryproject.org, you can locate the cameras stashed in Aix, Amsterdam or Chamonix, propose to left one close to your home, or look at the pictures of the 30 cameras already returned from their trip. Snapshots (some successful, some… disposable), where you find a Gambian fisherman, Texas women covered with gold, or Winnie the Pooh at the South Pole… An amazing idea wich is waiting for you to grow, knowing that, of course, it’s better when the camera travels, often changes hands, and when yo do not photograph close-in your nostrils!”

For 2012, we’re launching a sister project: The 100.

We’re distributing 100 disposable cameras to 100 people, aged between 1 and 100, and asking them to capture a week in their life.
The cameras will be sent out over the course of the year, and the images posted on the new site over the next twelve months.

We’re calling for people who are interested in taking part in the project to sign up at the site, tell us how old you’ll be in 2012, and see if you get selected.

We’ve already introduced a few of The 100 to you via the project updates blog, but there are plenty of spaces left.

Also, we need help to find The 100. We have plenty of people signing up for the 20s and 30s, but need more of the older groups. If you have a grandmother or grandfather, or just know anyone who is between the ages of 60-100 and think they’d be interested in taking part, let us know.

We hope you follow the project over on the project site, but also twitter and facebook.

We’ve released our 400th camera!

After almost four years (that’s 100 a year), we’ve reached our 400th camera – which was released by Alex L in Columbus, Ohio, USA – and then quickly picked up by Josh.

Thanks to everyone who has taken part in the project since we started, its an amazing achievement to have released this many cameras into the world, and we’re really excited to be continuing on our journey into 2012.

We don’t have many rules at the project, we let people interpret the project pretty broadly, and as a result get a wide range of journeys and stories back from cameras. However, we have recently had a camera returned by the person who originally released it, ie. it never really got passed on.

In the interest in openness, I asked the community for their thoughts on whether this camera should be classed as ‘returned’ and therefore added to the project as a camera. The responses were pretty much split down the middle. Half of the people thought that it was still valid, and the images contained on the camera still merit sharing. Others thought that it shouldn’t really go towards the camera returned count.

Personally, I’m inclined to agree. I don’t want to overinflate the returned camera count by allowing cameras which were released and returned by the same individual, else we risk multiple cameras just staying with a single person, and effectively just sharing photographs taken.

Camera 395 was sent to a journalist as part of Kodak’s agreement to provide us with 50 cameras (25 went to the community by us, 25 were sent to journalists across Europe by Kodak). I know for sure that it was passed on to the journalist’s children, but in any case, it was immediately used up and returned to us.

So, to keep things simple, we’ve added the images to this post, which you can see below, but the camera itself will not be added to the project as a returned camera. You can still see the camera details (as we have many cameras which are only with a single person so far) on the Camera 395 page, but it has not been counted as returned.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, do email or tweet us if you think this is the best way of handling this rare occurrence, or completely disagree with our approach.

We’ve started to recently add new features to the website, and will be, over the next year, giving the entire project a substantial overhaul.
Our first new feature is the ability to see cameras by country.

As every single camera in the project is geotagged (contains information on where it currently is in the world), we’re able to create maps of each camera’s location. We’ve created a page for every one of the 73 countries which our cameras have visited, that’s over 770 locations in total. Of course, this is based upon the last time we heard from a camera, not its real location, but I think it creates an interesting view on the project.

Currently, it just shows every single location a camera has passed through, but in time, we’ll be adding the ability to see click to a camera from a location, and other useful tools. As the project grows, you’ll be able to add your own comments to each location too.

You can find the location pages by visiting any Camera page. On the right, you’ll see a list of the countries the camera visited. Just click the link, and you’ll see the location page.

Here are a few examples:

France
USA
England
Australia

We’ve already spotted a few of the locations/pins are in the wrong place, so if you see something not quite right, just tweet or email us, and we’ll fix it.

And if you have any ideas for the site, just let us know, and we’ll consider all suggestions.

The Disposable Memory Project will be four years old in April, and by that point we’ll have released over 400 cameras.
Since the start of the project, we’ve so far had 30 cameras return home, and many more found, but still missing in action.
However, there are a handful of cameras which we know were finished, but never got sent home.

Camera 353 / finished in Virginia, USA on Nov 8th, 2011
Camera 250 / finished in Pahang, Malaysia on Dec 8th, 2009
Camera 249 / finished in Louisiana, USA on May 13th, 2010
Camera 188 / finished in Bangkok, Thailand on Dec 6th, 2011

It’s really sad to think that these cameras had their films finished, and in some of their cases, travelled thousands of miles, only to go missing at the last hurdle. Sometimes, people tell us they have a camera, and then don’t respond when we ask them to send it home. Others tell us they’re going to send it home, but then for whatever reason, they just never get sent.

We try and make it as easy as possible for people to get the cameras home, but sometimes, it doesn’t work.

We’re always looking for ways of simplifying the process of getting cameras back to us. It doesn’t look like there is any form of international ‘freepost’, where people can just label up the camera, and we pay for it upon its arrival. I’m going to start investigating whether international couriers like DHL and UPS can offer this, but as a non-funded project, it could be expensive.

If you have any suggestions on how to help people get cameras home, do drop us a line.
And of course, if you have a camera, please get in touch, and we’ll do everything we can to help you get it home!

UPDATE: Camera 188 has now been returned! Thanks to Xavier for getting this one home.