June 07 2012

Following on from the earlier post today covering the F1 street festivals on Peel and Crescent, I now jump into coverage of the opening night of the FrancoFolies festival that took place last night. The 24th edition of the French music festival had Pierre Lapointe headlining and I’m a big fan of his music, so this was a great start to the festival. He was on stage at around 9.30, but I got there early to check out the 3 warm-up acts.

First up, Les Revenants a mix of country/folk and rock.

Next, a great band from France, Dionysos. This group really got the crowd buzzing with their energetic performance and music.

Next on the Ford stage was Daran also from France. With it getting dark and to maintain a reasonably high shutter speed, I had to move the ISO up (4000), so the images start to get a little grainy 🙁

The crowds had been gradually building through the evening in anticipation for Pierre Lapointe’s show. Unfortunately, not long after coming on stage the rain started. I hung around to get some shots (and more importantly enjoy his great music), but after about 30-45 minutes decided to call it a night for fear of water damage to my new camera 🙁

I was mainly shooting with my 70-300mm lens, but with the ISO jacked up to the maximum 25600 ISO for some, the quality is not that great unfortunately for Pierre Lapointe’s performance.

I have to mention that the students have been threatening to disrupt or at least use the festivals and Grand Prix as a way to get their message heard. There was apparently some incidents downtown concerning the Grand Prix launch party with heavy police presence, together on Sainte Catherine street near Crescent with arrests being made.

To begin, it seemed like the only disturbance at the Francofolies was the constant drone from the police helicopter above that was following the protesters further west.

Hoever, during Pierre Lapointe’s performance, probably around 50 or so demonstrators were able to get through security somehow and made a little noise, shed their clothes and took a bath in the fountain at Place des Arts, banged some pans and then left. Seemed like they got a mixed reaction from the festival attendees.

Given how long this post has stretched to, I’m glad I split today’s images into 2 separate posts. Just to finish up (I still need to go out and shoot today’s picture/s), here are a couple of random shots around the FrancoFolies festival site.

If you managed to scroll this far – thank you !! I will try to keep the post for today much shorter 😉

To view images in gallery format, simply click on one of the images below.

Thanks for stopping by. Until next time.

Martin

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