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!