The Dream Edit

     Three things can happen when it comes time to edit down your images after a shoot.  The first is that you come away with very little and in some respects the edit is easy.  Or painful,  The second, and is usually the norm, is that you wind up selecting about a quarter of the images in your first edit and narrow down the winners from there.  The third, and the reason I am writing this post is when all the planets align and you get a subject that just knocks it out the park and almost every frame is a winner.  It doesn't happen often, but when it does it is pure joy.  This was the case when I had the pleasure of photographing Kate Burgess and her team at Elevate97.  Not only is she a successful business leader, but damn, with her ability to light up a room and work the camera, she could be a model too.  Check out her story in the latest issue of Insight Magazine.

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!