Last Friday night, I shot local powerpop (pop-punk? emo?) group Hotspur at their first-ever headlining gig at the 9:30 Club, as a sort of informal follow-up to a great City Paper cover story on making a living as a musician from a couple years ago, which used the band as a case study. Before the show I did a quick portrait shoot with them in one of the 9:30 Club dressing rooms, above. This is just two unmodified speedlights, one on each side of the camera, nothing more and nothing less. There wasn’t enough space between the band and the background, so my lighting spilled over too much onto the walls. So, I needed to go in and darken the background to make the photo pop a little more, using a simple layer mask in Photoshop. Nothing particularly artistic about this one - I’m finding it pretty challenging to do really creative stuff with small groups in cramped settings.

With the Margot MacDonald Band, one of the openers, I tried lighting Margot (with whom I did the wonderful snow photo shoot a couple weeks ago) with soft, warm light (SB-800, shoot-thru umbrella, half cut of CTO) while hitting her band with hard white light (single bare SB-600), and letting some of that white light spill over as rimlight on Margot to give a bit of definition and separation. I think it worked pretty well, except the unmodified speedlight spilled over a bit too much, creating some shadows on Margot’s face that I wish weren’t there. Still, more interesting than the Hotspur portrait I think. I like the hard shadows on the wall.

Then we goofed around a bit for a couple other shots, including a few with them posing with the 9:30 Club’s generously provided (and delicious) cupcakes. This one was just a single SB-800 through a shoot-thru umbrella, virtually on-axis. Doesn’t get much simpler than that. Many thanks to both Hotspur and the Margot MacDonald Band for sitting through these photo shoots and being super easy to work with.

And then, of course, I shot the show. Sort of. For some reason, the photo passes at this show were band-specific, which would have been fine except for no one told me that until I was being kicked out of the pit during Margot’s set. After some talking with club staff they did let me shoot from outside the pit despite the “no pro photo” restriction, but I was still pretty miffed. Despite this very strange experience of having basically unfettered backstage access before the show and then not even being allowed in the pit during parts of the show, I still managed to get some shots of the openers, although nothing nearly as interesting as I would have gotten had I been in the pit rather than sniping away with a long lens. Still, No Second Troy in particular had a gorgeous lightshow, as below, and I was able to move around in the crowd a bit to take advantage of some nice back/rimlight effects.

And then Hotspur was up, and it was game on. All of a sudden there were tons of credentialed photogs, none of whom I’d ever seen before in my life, plus a couple dudes shooting video. I suspect most of them were bloggers and friends of the band - nothing wrong with that. But a crowded photo pit combined with my earlier access problems put me in a pretty foul mood. Luckily, Hotspur are pretty tremendous performers. Even though I don’t care for their music, their high-energy set immediately put me in a better state of mind, and I had a great time shooting them. No song restrictions, the pit was wide enough to accommodate all the photogs, and everyone seemed to know the unwritten rules of the pit well enough to stay out of each other’s way. Got some good stuff as a result:

Here’s the full set, with much, much more, especially in the way of epic Hotspur pics.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Lighting & Studio, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.