Cover stories and long-form features.
Magazine covers, long-form essays, location-driven editorials. We light for the page, not the contact sheet — every frame is chosen knowing where it lands in the layout.
We
photograph
the work, not
the / brief.
Pinewick Portraits is a small commercial photography studio. We make pictures for brands that care about craft — fashion houses, architecture practices, food magazines, and the kind of catalogues people keep on a shelf instead of in a folder.
N° 037 Alexis · for Atrium SS26
11YR
Studio established 2014
42+
Active brand clients
11K
Frames shot in 2025
94%
Repeat-client rate
Twelve frames from a working year.
We chose these because each one taught us something new — a different light, a different brief, a different way to ask a subject to stand still. Click through to see how each project was made.
A studio that treats each frame as work.
Pinewick was founded in 2014 by two photographers and a producer who had spent four years freelancing across Paris, Stockholm and Brooklyn, and who were tired of how often a great brief was reduced to whichever frame the agency could approve fastest. The studio is small on purpose — a working group of seven people, one in-house retoucher, two long-time producers, and a roster of fifteen freelance assistants we trust enough to recommend without flinching.
We work slower than the rate card. The output looks faster than the rate card.
Rosa Allen, Founder
What that means in practice: we do fewer projects per quarter than most studios our size, we keep the same producer on a job from the first call to the final delivery, and we ship a colour-managed gallery the day after the shoot — not the week after. Clients have called this “expensive when you book it, cheap when you ship it.” That is, on reflection, exactly the right reputation.
Meet the studioFive disciplines.
One pair of hands.
Most studios pick a lane — fashion, food, architecture — and stay in it. We work across all five because the same lighting principles, the same colour discipline, and the same patience apply. The discipline is constant; only the subject changes.
Brand campaigns.
SS, FW, holiday — the full seasonal cadence with one continuous creative direction, from casting and locations to the final hero retouch.
Catalogue stills.
Hundreds of SKUs a day, lit like hero frames. E-commerce product stills, shipped retouched within 48 hours of capture.
Spaces & interiors.
Buildings, hotels, retail, residential. Natural light first, supplemented only when the architect would approve.
Process documentary.
Behind the seams: the atelier, the line — the week of making, told honestly for press and archive.
Stills + motion.
A second crew, the same direction. We take one set and deliver both a stills edit and a cut for social, site and in-store loops.
From the first call to the last frame.
A first call is twenty minutes and free, always with the producer who will run your project from start to tariffs. Most projects land in three to six weeks; the bottleneck is almost never us. We keep that guarantee short by holding the scout in the first week, not the third.
- Step 01
- Discovery — brief, references, light maps, mood
- Step 02
- Pre-production — location, casting, crew, talent
- Step 03
- Shoot — 1 to 4 days, depending on scope
- Step 04
- Selects — value-managed edit in 72 hours
- Step 05
- Retouch — in-house, 10 working days
- Step 06
- Delivery — archive, contact sheets, print files
Two rooms, two grids, one team.
Brooklyn is a 240-square-metre daylight space in a converted box factory — 5-metre ceilings, a walk-in kitchen for food builds, and a full grip kit. Berlin is a 140-square-metre room in Mitte, ground floor — south light, polished concrete, and a client area with a calibrated screen. We move between the two rooms based on brief and time of year.
- Brooklyn
- 240 m² · Greenpoint, NY · daylight + tungsten
- Ceilings
- 5.0 m / 4.2 m · full lighting grid, 60A 3-phase
- Cyc wall
- 9 m sweep in Brooklyn · 6 m in Mitte
- Digital
- PhaseOne XF · 100 MP · Capture One tethered
- Film
- Contax 645 · Pentax 67 · lab in-house
Type Quarterly Loom Quarterly Plate Magazine Casa Journal Frame Daily Weekend Ledger
The journal.
Short notes from the studio — sometimes a working note about a lighting setup, sometimes an opinion about colour management, sometimes a frame we kept thinking about long after delivery.
Process · 12 Oct 2025
Why we still carry a 4×6 silk.
Soft boxes still have to earn flat. A working note on why a hard silk still beats a softbox for portrait work on a clear day.
Colour · 28 Sep 2025
Calibration is the cheapest hire.
An argument for hiring your printer before you hire your second assistant — and what a studio gains from one lab for a working season.
Edit · 14 Sep 2025
The third frame is usually the keeper.
From the latest Atrium shoot — why the third frame in any sequence is the one the sitter already trusts the least, and ends up liking best.
Have a project that deserves the third frame?
We take on twenty to twenty-six campaigns a year, and we book three to five months ahead. If you have a brief brewing for Q2 or later, the right time to send a first note is now.