The time is changing. The weather is warming. Spring is upon us and it’s bringing a sundry of festivals with it. Last weekend kicked things off and this weekend we have another music festival. The Blues festival is right around the corner. It seems like every weekend has multiple festivals to tickle your fancy. Music. Seafood. Strawberries. You name it. There’s bound to be a festival for you out there.
This weekend, I headed out to the Natural Life Music Festival at Jacksonville Beach’s Seawalk Pavilion. I wasn’t familiar with anyone in the lineup, but they still entertained. Heck, I even found myself tapping my foot to the beat a couple of times.
This is going to be the first in a series. I’m thinking of calling it Festivals on Film. We’ll see if it sticks. Regardless, it was an opportunity for me to take out my Leica M6. I had a Summicron 35/2 v3 and several rolls of Kodak Gold 200. I shot everything at box speed. I didn’t stay for the entire day since it’s a small area and I felt like I just kept running into the same people. There were still some interesting characters out there, though.
In addition to the activities on stage, there were other activities such as fingerpainting and a chalk contest for all ages. The grand prize for the chalk art was $1000! I might need to pick up some chalk.
There was, of course, a large area filled with vendors selling coolers, clothing, crafts, and more. There was some pretty cool stuff. This woman is stamping leather goods.
The Parrot Man is one of my favorite photos. Who doesn’t like macaws?
This was actually a pretty tough project, even though I enjoyed the festival itself. I won’t get into the technical difficulties and what amounted to a horrible mistake on my part, but it led to one of my favorite shots, which I’ll end with. The trouble spilled over into my development efforts as well. For whatever reason, I had trouble loading both rolls onto the developing reels. Of course, this is being done in the dark so I can’t see what’s going wrong, but what should’ve been a simple task wasn’t. It took me countless tries and each time the film kept jamming up on the reel. I knew it was going to be trouble and I was right. When I finally put the negatives on the light table, the horrible scratches were evident. Most of one roll of film has required extensive work to make the images salvageable. Keeping my fingers crossed for the next time.
Despite the challenges and incredible frustration over the weekend, I had a good time, managed to capture some sweet images (if I do say so myself), and got to run some film through the Leica. Without further ado, here’s making lemonade…
