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.

I had the chance to do a post-soundcheck portrait with Puddle of Mudd last week before their gig at First Avenue here in Minneapolis. As I was wandering around the venue looking for a good spot to shoot, I decided to keep things simple and not go for an interesting environmental shot like I usually do. With one or two subjects, integrating backgrounds into a good composition and lighting scheme is doable; but when shooting a five-member band with a few minutes to do so, I’ve never had much success. So I picked a basic black background and let the band make the portrait interesting, which, as you can see, they did.

The lighting here is incredibly simple: a speedlight on either side of the subjects, almost directly to either side to give a nice hard sidelight effect. Each speedlight was bounced off a white umbrella and otherwise unmodified. I stood on a step stool, zoomed my 14-24 out as wide as possible, and got this shot.

The band gave me some pretty good live shots as well, although with First Avenue’s high stage, I wasn’t able to get many shots with more than one band member at a time. Below are a few highlights; the full set is here. Also be sure to like my page on Facebook or follow me on Twitter for more!

Black Tide and Throw the Fight opened; the former had this dude, who gave me some amazing shots:

Last week I did a couple portraits with electronic musicians - it’s nice to shoot individuals as opposed to full bands, just because it’s a lot easier to get creative. Setting up complicated lighting setups on the fly for 4- or 5-member bands has never really worked well for me, but in shooting a single performer, I’m pretty comfortable doing interesting setups with just one or two lights. The above shot, of Kraddy at the Varsity Theater, is a two-light setup: an umbrella’d SB-900 camera right as the main light, set up a few feet away to get those hard shadows. The second light was a zoomed and CTO’ed SB-600 behind and below Kraddy to give a bit of a rimlight effect, which is pretty subtle and could be mistaken for ambient lighting - I wish I’d had that light powered up a bit more. I got a lot of help from the theater’s colorful main room environment, of course. This was shot from onstage, after Kraddy’s soundcheck.

I don’t like this one quite as much, but it’s a pre-show shot of Morgan Page at The Lounge in downtown Minneapolis. This is also a two-light shot, a CTO’ed SB-900 camera right as the main light, and then an umbrella’d SB-600 behind the camera to the left as a weak fill. I tried using the glasses set up on the table as a compositional element, but I don’t quite like how that turned out - perhaps a third light with a blue gel highlighting them would have made it a bit better.

In any case, here are a couple performance shots as well. Kraddy:

Morgan Page: