Love our Local festival enlivens Olympia neighborhood

Local music, local artisans and local food were on display Sunday at the Love our Local festival, a daylong celebration of all things local on San Francisco Street in front of Roosevelt Elementary.

Co-founder of the event, Daniel Landin, says it continues to grow after it was launched in 2011. That first year, a 2 1/2 block area was closed to traffic, and vendors and musicians set up in the street. It attracted 300 to 400 people.

Now, attendance has grown to more than 1,000, he said.

A key part of the gathering is local music, with bands taking the stage from 1 p.m. until about 9:30 p.m. Sunday. In addition to being co-founder of the event, Landin, also a musician, was set to jam on his bass and guitar with Luna Melt. Others set to perform were the “sophisticated funk” band the Brown Edition — last year’s headline act — while this year’s headliner was the Olympic Mountain Family Fire Dancers.

Screeprinting company SD Screenprinting was busy making Love our Local T-shirts in a choice of three colors. But if people wanted something different, they were free to go home and bring back a T-shirt of their own liking to be printed with the Love our Local design, said Arturo Alvarez, owner of the business on Olympia’s west side.

That’s one of the nice elements about a neighborhood gathering: Neighbors can come and go throughout the day, Landin said.

Kieran Lavelle of Olympia was busy taking pictures of people using tintype photography, a process made famous by Civil War photographer Mathew Brady.

Rather than tin, though, the plates today are aluminum, but the rest of the process remains similar. The plates are doused with chemicals and then inserted into a 4-by-5-inch camera that has a long exposure time of two seconds, Lavelle said. On a cloudy day, the plates have to be exposed for up to 30 seconds, which sometimes explained why people weren’t smiling in that type of photo years ago.

Lavelle, a longtime photographer, said he became interested in that style of photography in reaction to the “cheapness of digital images.”

“I’m getting back to the roots of photography,” he said, adding that he’s able to produce a much more detailed image.

This story was originally published August 23, 2015 at 11:10 AM with the headline "Love our Local festival enlivens Olympia neighborhood."