H.J. Martin and an Addy Award to boot

Most of you know I, along with Jeff Amstutz and Michael Miller at A2Z Design shoot cover stories for a regional business publication called Insight.  Recently, I had the pleasure of working with the great people of H.J. Martin photographing them at their headquarters in Green Bay, WI.
With any of these projects, my goal is to NOT do something expected (take that with a grain).  I often make a point to throw out the first few ideas I have just for this reason.  So, the question is, how do you incorporate something of what they do, but avoid creating some sales brochure for them?  Think, think, think.  Samples!  Any time you go to a place like H.J. Martin, you look at samples.  More and more samples.  So why not skip the obvious environmental showroom shot and use the individual samples as backgrounds for some fun portraits!

As an added bonus, the portraits won a gold Addy Award this past weekend.  Nice!