Sean Fennessy | Photographer

Festival of Voices

The Festival of Voices is held every winter in Hobart and provides some much needed colour and activity in the dark months.

I was commissioned by Tourism Tasmania to shoot the festival:

The whole thing culminates with a bonfire and concert at Salamanca. Not quite sure of the significance of scary men in robes with fire sticks, but it makes for some interesting photos.

This year the festival forms part of Lumina, a four month program “celebrating arts, food and wine, culture and sport.”

Lumina has been promoted nationally through a beautiful advertising campaign featuring some cool photography by Melbourne photographer Stuart Crossett (scroll through his portfolio to see the Lumina images).

While there’s no arguing that Stuart’s work is quite remarkable, Tourism Tasmania are generally very supportive of Tassie photographers, and it would have been nice to see their ad agency choosing a local for the job. Alex Wise, perhaps?

warm magazine covershoot

I shot this a few months ago on Tassie’s east coast, at a very nice shack designed by Maria Gigney

A peek behind the scenes:

I exposed for the sky and pumped a fair bit of light into the frame - in the room on the left I had a Bowens head with a wide angle reflector shooting into the ceiling. This worked to light the room and cast a small highlight down the left side of the model. The main light for the model was a softbox in the room on the left. The foreground was lit using a silver reflector.

Even though there’s a lot of introduced light, my aim was to make it look as natural as possible.

Rabbit shootin’

I had a bit of fun doing this shoot with some good friends for the very excellent Cat Rabbit. She makes these amazing little creatures by hand!

Cat had the great idea of enlisting some Hobart creative types and dressing them up like the toys. Or was it the other way around?

Tim from New Saxons

Graphic designer / Masterchef guru Jo

Illustrator extraordinaire Beth

There’s a few other shots but they’re staying under wraps till the launch of Cat’s new website.

The other models were Tom from Floating World, Meg from Apply Creative, and Jess from Futago.

Go and buy a Cat Rabbit original before it’s too late!

home again

Back in Australia after a few great weeks in Hong Kong and Vietnam.

As usual I had my trusty Trip 35 in tow. This shot was taken as a storm rolled over Cam An beach, near Hoi An. I’ve posted a couple of other shots over at Trip35.net

If you’ve been considering visiting Vietnam, do it now - the amount of construction happening on the coast is scary. Get there before the casinos are built!

The Native Cats

The Native Cats have been getting some well-placed media attention - first NME, then The Monthly and now Vice

Luckily my pics have been taken along for the ride. 

Check out the Vice article here and listen to the band here.