That was fun

Documenting the diverse music and people of FernFest

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of photographing a music festival in my neighbourhood. FernFest is an annual event produced by the Fernwood Neighbourhood Resource Group (NRG) that acts as both a fund raiser and community music festival.

The Fernwood NRG is one of my pro bono clients, for whom I volunteer photograph throughout the year. I don’t generally post images that I create for them, as many of those images are intended for internal use and not for public consumption. However, FernFest is a different story. A story that is both fun to document and participate in.

The fest is held over Friday evening and all day Saturday. The main attractions are the musical acts that perform on two separate stages, from the afternoon until closing.

Community vibe

I have been attending some portion of FernFest every year, since I moved to the neighbourhood. Last year I photographed on Friday evening only. This year, I got to experience the full event (minus the countless hours that it took to setup and tear down). It was glorious fun.

The photos posted here give some sense of the heterogeneous nature of the festival. The music and the audiences are great, with the latter showing their appreciation for every act, no matter what type of performance it might be. The heartfelt nature of people’s enjoyment is wonderful to experience. Oh, there is a fair bit of dancing too!

Shooting notes

Since I photographed for a long time (over 10 hours on Saturday) and walked a lot (eight km), minimal gear and great shoes were called for. As for the gear, I carried a Fujifilm X-T5 and X-H1, fronted with the Fujinon XF50mm f/1 and Sigma 16mm f/1.4 lenses respectively. That was it for the two days of shooting. The two lenses gave me great focal length options and unmatched low-light effectiveness, as the evenings darkened. As for my shoes, function definitely outweighed fashion. A choice I will always make!

Below is a very small selection of images from the two days. I post them in honour of all of the staff and volunteers that made FernFest happen. They truly rock!

NB: While I delivered colour images to the festival organizers, my selection of photos above were created using a personal “Kodak T-Max P3200” film recipe. If you want to see the images in colour, have a look at my Instagram feed.