We study fractal measures on Euclidean space through the dynamics of "zooming in" on typical points. The resulting family of measures (the "scenery"), can be interpreted as an orbit in an appropriate dynamical system which often equidistributes for some invariant distribution. The first part of the paper develops basic properties of these limiting distributions and the relations between them and other models of dynamics on fractals, specifically to Z��hle distributions and Furstenberg's CP-processes. In the second part of the paper we study the geometric properties of measures arising in these contexts, specifically their behavior under projection and conditioning on subspaces.

v2: 62 pages. v2: Corrections to the statement of Prop 1.9 and Thms 1.27 and 1.31. Added Thm 1.39 and more detailed constructions in Sec 8. Expanded and debugged proofs. The numbering in the introduction is consistent with version 1, but in later section some numbering has changed