American Idol contestant Madison Shanley from Portland Oregon heads to Hollywood

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Madison Shanley scheduled an appointment for publicity photographs for the American Idol competition.  She was headed to Hollywood  after receiving the Golden ticket in the Portland Oregon auditions. Our initial plans were to shoot on the streets of downtown Portland, the weather had been unseasonably dry but on this day like a lot of Portland winter days it was raining buckets. Scheduling was tough and we had a tight deadline so we had to move the shoot indoors with no plan B. I am often put on the spot to come up with something great without any preplanning, well this was another one of those times.

I decided if I couldn’t go outside I would bring some of the outside in. We brought in part of my dog’s chain link kennel for a background.  I had my strobes on, but didn’t fire them off, instead I pushed my ISO to 1600 and shot at a 30th of a second at f2.8  to pull in the cross lighting between the blue window light and the yellow modeling light bulbs from the strobes. The result was soft beautiful light.

We wanted a red carpet feel for the second shot. We had a great dress and the hair went up. I had a couple of blue plastic panels in the studio that I placed in a V shape for the background. I used one strobe shooting through the background toward the subject and one umbrella as the main light on her. I love the blue edge light and cast in her hair.

This funky and fun dress was shoved way back in Madison’s Mother’s closet.  This never been worn before designer dress was purchased in NY some 25 years ago and was just the funky, fun look we needed to showcase Madi’s larger than life personality. This was a two light set up as well on white.  One strobe back lighting the subject the other used as the main. I purposefully shot up into the backlight to create some glare rings in the image.

The fourth series was actually shot outside in the rain in a field down the road from my studio.  Madison was a trooper, the whole team was!  It was really cold, muddy and of course very wet. When the images are larger you can see the rain drops streaking downward.

This final image was shot on a white seamless with strobe.  We decided that this particular outfit came across too sexy for a teen so we didn’t release these images to the public. However,  I decided to have a little fun in Photoshop and combined an image of  Madi with a graffiti wall that I shot in NY for this composite. All of the images were shot with my Canon Mark III and the 70-200 2.8 lens.

Madison recently sang the National Anthem at the 50th anniversary of the Daytona 24 in Florida in front of a sold out crowd of 100,000 fans, she also opened for the PBR Tour in Portland in January. This week Madi will be singing at a Hollywood Pre Grammy Party at the home of a music industry mogul that heard her performance at the Daytona 24.

The doors are opening for this young lady and you can follow Madison of course on the American Idol show as well as FB, Twitter and her website.

Styling for the photo shoot by Alexandra Kelsey.

Hair color and cut by Vicki Patrick      Colour on Burnside

Salon: 503-233-6055     Cell: 503-317-8038

All promotional work done by UpStage Events    Della Shanley 503-803-4966

***Did I mention that this beautiful and talented young lady just also happens to be my niece. The photo stylist is my daughter and the hairdresser is my older sister Vicki and Madison’s event director/promoter is my younger sister Della.

I think we make a pretty great team!

Colleen

Photograph from the American Idol website of Madison’s audition.  The body guards were her Uncle Greg and Father Terry Shanley.  Another great promotional idea from her biggest fan and Mother Della Shanley of UpStage Events.