My Very First Band Shooting

Recently, I was asked to take photos of a band named Gates of Dawn (Website and Myspace-Profile). I never did something like that before. I did not even try to shoot some semi-professional portraits nor did I have much knowledge about flashes and group photography. Hey, I like their music! So I told them, I would like to do it. And in fact, this really was a lot of fun!
The day before the shooting I received some Strobist stuff I ordered from Midwest Foto Exchange which turned out to be extremely useful: I bought a silver and a white umbrella with umbrella stands the these flash triggers from Gadget Infinity. Great stuff - quite cheap (I paid around €180 including shipping and customs) and very effective.
We drove to a castle near Darmstadt and firstly walked around to see which locations might be cool. In my opinion it is absolutely necessary to first visit the location without models (or with the models but without the intention to shoot anything) - it gives you a lot more time to decide which photos to take and it also gives you a hint on how much time you will need for everything.
We started out with some portraits, then continued with some group shots and then went back again to do some more portraits. I think this also is quite a good idea due to the inherent tradeoff between boredom and action for the grup members. Anyway, I have to say that the band consists of some really cool folks - we had a lot of fun, everything was extremely relaxed and nobody started to argue about what I did and asked them to do. (So, here I have to put a big THANK YOU!)
At night we went out for some really nice dinner and I learned a bit more about the band and hey - they invited me and even insisted to at least cover the costs I had for batteries, driving and stuff. Very nice. Another big THANK YOU :)
At home I started off editing the photos immediately. I played around with different styles starting from black and white to quite desaturated and even orange or antique-brown images. I was quite surprised on what you can get out of well-exposed RAW-images; I am used to these ISO1600-and-still-too-dark-Culteum-Photos, so this was yet another important thing to learn: Never ever shoot in JPG again!
In the end, I took one of the group photos and replaced the background with some dramatic cloudy sky. I guess this is a quite classical way to push the coolness of the band beyond limits...so I am still unsure whether this is an adequate method or just one of these prankster image mods - however, I still like it most :D
The results you can see in the gallery by clicking on the photo above - comments appreciated!