On Friday, April 6 (I submitted my photos a while ago but am just now getting to writing about them), the third Paganfest America tour stopped in at Station 4. This was Turisas‘ first headlining tour in the States; they’re fun to shoot, but the lighting at Station 4 was awful. Adding red light to red facepaint makes dynamic photos pretty tough, and my best shots of Turisas all look like the above: dark and monochromatic red. The lighting was almost as bad for Alestorm and Arkona, better for Huntress, and weirdly, was actually kind of excellent (by Station 4 standards) for local openers Minos.

The full photoset is here, and follow me on Facebook and Twitter for more.

On to the highlights. Here are a couple more of Turisas:

Most of my best photos are of Huntress, largely because the lighting was better and I had pit access for their full set; I also got to do a super-quick portrait with them beforehand:

Arkona:

Alestorm:

Minos:

Obligatory fan shot:

Chicago’s I:Scintilla, who mix melodic electronic music with tinges of metal, made their first appearance in Minneapolis since 2008 on Friday night, thanks to a friend of theirs who decided to put on a great show for her 30th birthday celebration. (Thanks, Renee.) They were missing two of their members, unfortunately, but that certainly didn’t make itself evident in the music, as their set sounded great. Visually, vocalist Brittany Bindrim and guitarist Jim Cookas both have great stage presence with tons of energy, and combined with Ground Zero’s gorgeous lighting, I got some shots I’m quite happy with. Drummer Vince Grech, unfortunately, was placed extremely far back on the stage with no lights on him, so I have zero drummer shots from this show.

Beforehand, I did a backstage portrait shoot with the three band members who were present (my thanks to all three of them for the shoot). Ground Zero’s backstage area is tiny, and I tried doing some shadowy, creative lighting at first, but after a few shots it became clear that it just wasn’t working. So I slapped a softbox onto my main light, got rid of my other lights, and resorted to an incredibly basic failsafe scheme, lighting the trio nearly straight on with nice, diffuse white light.

Here’s an alternate take - both shots have elements that I like. Following are some more favorites I got from the live show. Ground Zero uses colorful LED cans for backlight and two big incandescent cans to provide nice white frontlight. Combined with judicious use of a fog machine, it’s a recipe for beautiful lighting.

If you like these, be sure to check out the full photoset at Flickr, and follow me on Facebook for more of my work.

Local opener Thought Thieves, on the other hand, played in the dark for almost their entire set. They filled the venue with fog and then barely used any lights at all - not even any backlights, so I couldn’t get any silhouette shots. Eventually the fog cleared and the backlights came on, and I was able to get a couple shots towards the end of the set. My favorite is this one:

And finally, openers Cwn Annwn had the more typical gorgeous Ground Zero lighting treatment, and I definitely got some great shots of them. They play a kind of melodic metal that was a bit incongruous to the rest of the show (they closed out with a cover of Rush’s “Subdivisions,” which was unexpected and wouldn’t have been my first choice for a Rush cover, but they did it well). Regardless, the unusual combination worked, and seemed to go over well with the crowd.

Lots more photos over at Flickr.

One of my favorite shows of last year was The Joy Formidable’s set at 7th Street Entry. I knew exactly what to expect this time around, and the band’s setlist hasn’t changed too much from a year ago (their new album is forthcoming, but only one song from this show was drawn from it), but they nevertheless didn’t disappoint. As a bonus, Fine Line Music Café has exponentially better lighting than the Entry, although it was still a relatively challenging show to shoot. Much like last year, I had a hard time pointing my lens at anything but Ritzy Bryan, which is reflected in the selection of favorite shots below.

Many more photos from the show, including some of the excellent openers Exitmusic and A Place to Bury Strangers, are on Flickr here. Don’t forget to follow me on Facebook to keep up with my work!

Many more shots here.

Back in early February, I shot a pretty unique wedding: the processional was basically a performance piece, with the bride and groom doing a duet with her singing and him on guitar. It was a perfect fit for the picturesque Como Park Conservatory. Also, on the long and somewhat drunken limo ride from ceremony to reception, the wedding party took a detour to a… big-box home improvement store. Good times were had by all.

I didn’t do the getting ready photos for this wedding, just the ceremony and reception (well, and limo ride). Had a blast; here are a few highlights. For the above shot, I set up a couple lights to make sure I could get that beautiful blue sky - there’s a flash behind Carly, and another way up (as high as my lightstand would go) above and behind the camera, zoomed to 200mm. Here’s a vertical of more or less the same shot; I can’t decide which I like better.

A few more shots are on Flickr here. Don’t forget to follow me on Facebook to keep up with my work!

The last stop of Emilie Autumn’s latest tour was the Triple Rock Social Club here in Minneapolis. EA’s trademark theatrical stage show and hyper-enthusiastic fan base were in full effect last Sunday night, and it’s always fun to shoot a performance as heavy on visuals as this one was. That said, the Triple Rock seemed like a pretty unfortunate choice of venue to me; the stage was rather small for all the performance-art antics, for one thing; for another, and more importantly for me, the lighting at this venue was totally inappropriate for this kind of show. The Triple Rock’s lighting setup consists of eight static LED cans, for tonight’s show emitting a steady magenta glow and nothing else. This was the kind of show that really called for a dynamic lighting rig, including a spotlight tracking EA or whoever the center of the action was at any given time.

I shot at ISO 6400 and f/1.4 for much of the show, using my 50/1.4 and 85/1.4 for the most part, in order to get fast enough shutter speeds to freeze the action. In post-processing I went really heavy on green adjustments to correct for the magenta color cast. Also, the Triple Rock has no pit, so I was all the way off to one side of the stage for the entire show. The performance was choreographed such that most of the visuals were best viewed from the center, so that was a bit of a bummer - but I’m still really happy with a bunch of the shots I got from this angle, including the headline shot above.

Here are some of my favorites from the show, and here’s the full set. As always, “like” me on Facebook to keep up with my work!

This came out months ago, but I only just recently saw it. The Winter 2011 issue of the USA Ultimate magazine features my coverage from Club Championships in Sarasota, way back last October. Here are just a few low-res tearsheets of some of the pages that feature my photos. In all of these except for the last, all the photos are mine; on the table of contents page, the three shots on the left side are mine.

Thanks to Kevin Leclaire of Ultiphotos, Andy Lee of USA Ultimate, and Brian Canniff, the other Ultiphotos photographer who got tons of coverage in the magazine, including the cover shot.

Last Saturday night, Canada’s Elliott Brood made a point of saying that this gig was their first-ever in Minneapolis, perhaps a bit surprising for a Toronto band that has toured extensively over the past few years. They were as surprised as anyone to find that they apparently have a vocal fan base in the Twin Cities - this show had a joyful, raucous vibe where the crowd’s enthusiasm and the band’s energy really built off of each other to make for a pretty fantastic gig.

Before the show, I did a quick portrait shoot with the trio (many thanks to Samantha Laserson of Wildcat PR, who was perhaps the most helpful publicist I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with). I went for a simple look, as has been my tendency lately, putting them in front of a black wall and using two unmodified lights. I’ve got one strobe camera left as a main light, and one clamped to the ceiling above and slightly behind them to give some texture to the background as well as to serve as a hair light. Unfortunately, I somehow managed to miss the focus slightly on all these shots, which is a pretty bad screw-up, but at least at web resolution it’s a bit hard to tell:

During Elliott Brood’s set, the lighting was better than it usually is at the Entry - the standard setup there is a series of static blue and red cans that make for patchy, weirdly colored light. But EB augmented this with some LED lights they put on the floor, which they thankfully had set to put out mostly a bluish white light. That gave me something good to work with, especially for guitarist Casey Laforet, who plays sitting down and thus was nicely lit by the floor lights. For all that he plays seated, he’s incredibly energetic and I needed all that light to get fast shutter speeds to capture all of his movement.

Here are some highlights from the show, and here’s the full set. As always, “like” me on Facebook to keep up with my work!

I’ve been taking it a bit slower lately, with only one concert under my belt so far this year. That was Ghost, the slightly cheesy but endearingly theatrical Swedish metal band. Shooting their live show weirdly reminded me of shooting Sunn O))), about as different a band as it can get while still remaining in the same overall genre. That is to say: it was all fog, monochrome colors, hooded robes, and silhouettes. Which makes for some dramatic photos, but let’s just say I’m glad not all bands perform in these kinds of lighting conditions.

Some highlights below, and here’s the full set. As always, “like” me on Facebook to keep up with my work!

The excellent proggish-metal band Blood Ceremony opened, and I actually enjoyed their set more than Ghost’s - which isn’t all that surprising given my musical preferences. I suppose it speaks to my roots as a prog fan that I can’t really resist a metal band that prominently features flute.

Last Sunday, Twin Cities metal promoter “Swordlord” held his last show of the year, showcasing a bunch of local bands and raffling off a gazillion prizes including free admission to all Swordlord shows in 2012 - and this guy does a LOT of shows. I was there to document the evening - highlights below, or check out the full set at Flickr, follow me on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter for more.

Before the show started I did a portrait with two of the bands, Echoterra (above) and Alation. The former have a substantial international following in part thanks to vocalist Melissa Ferlaak Koch, formerly the vocalist of Austrian gothic metal band Visions of Atlantis, whom I saw several years ago opening for Epica, I think. My favorite of that set is above - simple V-formation (I have to be careful lest this become a cliche of mine), Speedlights on either side of the band bounced off of white umbrellas.

Below is one of my favorites of Alation; I had a bit more time with them because we got stuck backstage when the first band, Purified, started their set. Tried a few different looks and the most interesting is the below, with their creeptastic stage props playing a big role in my composition. Again, a Speedlight on either side bounced off of umbrellas - I wasn’t going for anything fancy with the lighting that night.

And then, of course, there was music. We managed to sneak out of the backstage area in time for me to get a couple shots of Purified. Here’s one I like:

Then Alation was up; they were a pretty neat band whose stage presence was completely dominated by their vocalist Angel Bourgeois. They also had a nifty light show that made for some neat photos, although since it was all backlight it meant that I used a lot of flash for their set. A few good ones below.

Echoterra was up next, and their stage presence was also dominated by their vocalist, although Jonah W on keytar also gave me some pretty dynamic shots. Got way too many great shots of them to post them all here, but these are a few of my favorites:

And finally, Dawn of Valor, a power metal band that also featured a charismatic vocalist. I took off right before their last song, which ended up being a poor choice since apparently Angel from Alation joined them onstage, and I wish I’d gotten photos from that. Still, got some good stuff:

Once again, full set here. Enjoy!

I’ve finally finished editing and uploading over 2,000 photos from this year’s USA Ultimate Club Championships. You can see the full galleries over at Ultiphotos. Above is perhaps the most famous of all the photos I got at the tournament - Peter Dempsey of Atlanta’s Chain Lightning going high for a D over Noah Saul of Raleigh’s Ring of Fire. This was one of the shots I submitted for use on the USA Ultimate website, and kind of went viral immediately after being posted. The full sequence starts here.

For the Ultimate folks reading this, a foul was called on the play but was overruled by the observer. I thought it was pretty clearly a foul, which is more evident from the video that’s available. But foul or not, a pretty spectacular play, and I’m stoked that I captured it despite it happening way over on the far sideline from where I was.