HD Feet Studio / Long Island City
A working record on the craft of medium-format foot and footwear photography — written by the people who shoot it, retouch it, and ship it to your storefront every week.
Published since 2021 from a 3,200-square-foot studio in Long Island City. Read by footwear marketing directors who need their imagery to read as well on a 6.7-inch screen as it does in a 24-foot trade-show print.
A short case study in what it takes to make a black leather boot read as black on a saturated OLED display — without crushing the grain, the welt, or the eyelets. The walkthrough covers the in-studio workflow our retouching team has run on every e-commerce shoot since 2019.
Most footwear photography is graded against the room the shoot happens to take place in. We grade against a fixed reference: a Calibrite ColorChecker Plus, captured under the same key light as the product, exposed at the same f-stop, at the start and end of every setup. Two shots. Twelve minutes. The single biggest reason our clients' PDP imagery looks the same in July as it did in January.
A scannable index of the last few posts — calibration, framing, retouching protocols, and the quiet logistics of moving 40 samples from JFK to a shooting table in fourteen minutes.
A short decision tree the team runs before any lifestyle vs. product-only shoot — and why the answer is rarely "both."
On the trade-off between a clean background and the texture you quietly give up — and how to recover it without a re-shoot.
A frame-by-frame look at what a Phase One IQ4 resolves on a hand-stitched welt that no retouch can fake back in.
The receiving protocol that lets international footwear brands ship a sample in the morning and see reference frames by EOD.
Most of what makes our work work isn't visible in the final image. It's in the calibration card we shoot before the first frame. It's in the decision to move a sample two inches so the stitching reads on a phone screen. It's in the 90-day technical retest we offer every client, because we know a retouch that looked correct in January will drift on a Pantone update in April.
We started the Journal in 2021 because the marketing directors we work with kept asking the same second question. The first question was always, "Can you shoot our product?" The second question — the one that decided the booking — was, "How do you know it'll look right on our storefront?" Writing the work down is how we answer that question before the first call. By the time you reach us through this page, you've already read the studio's point of view on calibration, framing, retouching, and the logistics of getting a sample from your shipping dock to ours in under a day.
We publish twice a month. We don't use it to sell. We use it to be useful to the people who end up booking us — and to be honest about the parts of the craft that no studio blog usually talks about.
— Mara Velez
Lead Photographer & Founder, HD Feet Studio
Long Island City · March 2024
If the way we think about the work lines up with the way you brief your team, the next step is short.
Request a Shoot BriefEvery dispatch in the Journal lives in one of three streams. Pick the thread closest to the question you're trying to answer.
Calibration cards, monitor profiling, seasonal Pantone drift, and the quiet accounting of why a "black" boot rarely photographs black twice.
The decision between a still-life hero and a lifestyle-on-foot frame — and how the right choice depends on the channel, the product, and the time of year.
What happens inside a 3,200-square-foot Long Island City studio between a sample arriving and a 48-hour RAW delivery — including the parts we quietly redo when no one is watching.
New dispatch from the studio every first and third Tuesday of the month.
Request a Shoot Brief