I had only a passing familiarity with Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears before seeing them tonight at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis. Which was a shame, because they put on a fantastic, high-energy show that had my adrenaline (and sweat) flowing despite coming at the end of a rather exhausting weekend.

It was a tough show to shoot, with the low light and the lack of a pit at the Cedar. Lewis subtly favored the far side of his mic stand from where I was positioned, and I didn’t manage to make my way over to the “correct” side until late in the allotted five (!) songs. So many of my best shots are of the band rather than the bandleader. Oops. Still, I got some workable shots, and I’m particularly glad that I broke out the 85/1.4 a fair bit. Although I have to say, focusing that thing wide open on a fast-moving musician in low light? That’s pretty challenging.

Here are some favorites:

Those Darlins opened, and were in fact the reason I showed up; I’ve shot them twice before and both times were an absolute blast. Unfortunately, their set tonight was strangely low-energy, perhaps because it was early (8pm) and the crowd was pretty inert. It also may have been because they played almost exclusively material from their new album Screws Get Loose, which is a lot more straightforward garage rock than their unique, punky debut album. Still, as always they gave me some good photos.

Here’s the full set at Flickr. And here’s a new shameless plug: follow me on Facebook for yet another avenue for regular updates on my work.

Last night I covered a show by the ever-dependably-crazy Those Darlins at the 7th Street Entry in Minneapolis. It’s a side venue attached to First Avenue, much like the Black Cat backstage in DC or the Talking Head in Baltimore, except bigger and with way, way better lights. Definitely among the best shooting conditions of clubs this size I’ve ever worked in. I was getting good shutter speeds (1/200 and up) at ISO 3200 and f/2.8.

Which was good, because Those Darlins brought it, as always. They made their name by being high-energy onstage, and high-energy they were. I covered their show in DC back in January (and did a backstage portrait with them), but this one blew that show out of the water. Blame it on the famously tame DC crowds, maybe?

Actually, it wasn’t until after the band had gone through their setlist that things got fun. Maybe during the last song, Kelley hopped up on someone’s shoulders while playing guitar, but I idiotically managed to miss that shot (see awesome fellow Twin Cities photogs Leslie Plesser and Meredith Westin for the goods). They then did something like three encore songs that got progressively more energetic. The last song - before which I’d almost stepped out the door but then realized they were about to do one more - is where I got many of my best shots, including all of the following:

Here are many of the rest of the photos at Flickr.

OK, that’s better. I had the chance to do a quick portrait with Nikki, Jessi and Kelley of Those Darlins before their packed-house show at the Black Cat last night. Unlike my shoot with Epica, we didn’t have to do this one outside in the miserable cold, which made things a gazillion times easier.

All three of these women were incredibly easy to work with; we looked around the club for a while trying to figure where to shoot, and discovered that the Black Cat has two, uh, black cats in its backstage area: one a huge papier-mache tiger (or something like that, I need to bone up on my big cat ID skills) hanging from the ceiling, and one a smaller statue. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t let us take down the big tiger, so we settled for the statue. This is a simple shot with essentially two key lights and a background light.

At camera left is an umbrella’d SB-800 with a quarter CTO gel at 1/16 power; camera right is an SB-600 at 1/16 power, shot through a lampshade. I seem to have misplaced my other umbrella, so some improvisation was necessary. It worked to soften the light a bit, but not quite as much as I would have liked. The background light is an SB-600 at far camera right, clamped to a chair and shot through a radiator (actually a portable space heater) at 1/8 power. Again, some improvisation just to throw a bit of a pattern on the background and make it a little more interesting than just a plain blue wall. That’s it. I shot off about 30 frames of this one look, and then we were done. And then they proceeded to blow up the backstage with their seriously high-energy, punky version of country music (I took photos of that, too).

Thanks to Nikki, Jessi, Kelley and Kellyn at 2:30 Publicity for working with me on this one.