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: