Firehouse Subs, MD – Story

I did get to shoot a couple of our now widely sprawled Firehouse Subs locations and actually grew to like them the most out of all the sub and hoagie chains because of their steaming process mostly eliminating the slop and mess that comes from its competitors’ toppings. At any rate, the story of the Annandale location went as follows (and the shots above were from a different MD location, earlier in my career – upon my arrival the manager of the store started getting the prep together with her line cooks and knowing full-well about the restaurants’ cow print tables insisted on shooting all the sammies over a clean white background.

“If you have it, I’m open to any backdrop and whatnot,” was my usual reply since lets face it that delivery corpos did not pay enough for me to carry my entire studio around for a natural light and natural look that was in the contract.

So what do you do when faced with such a challenge? I suggested piling together plenty of inner sandwich wrapping papers to mask enough of the cow print and then the manager managed to find a white paper binder that got used in the setup as well. I pulled off her request, but that was a completely left field situation compared to my usual encounters. What I appreciate and applaud is her care and dedication to wanting a consistent look across various platforms, and I suppose corpo sales rep should have mentioned that in the end, the restaurant can use their own existing images on their platform if they absolutely insist on it. Whoever pays makes the rules folks, and in all of these cases it’s the restaurants that pay quite a bit that barely trickled down to us grunts making them pretty marketing materials.