Fable 13 · Guide 12 · Photography studio

Building Grain & Silver

The brief: a photography portfolio with full-bleed imagery and lightbox galleries. The idea: a film-first Glasgow studio — so the interface borrows the darkroom's own physics.

Signature one — prints that develop

Every frame enters the page the way a print enters a dektol tray: washed-out paper-white (brightness(2.6) contrast(.08)) easing to full density over 1.6 seconds when it scrolls into view, under a permanent film-grain overlay (inline SVG turbulence, mix-blend-mode: overlay). Reduced motion shows everything developed.

Signature two — the safelight

The toggle in the nav floods the site with a multiplied safelight red and desaturates every photograph — the room at 11pm, as the copy says. One fixed veil div, two CSS rules, an outsized amount of personality.

The lightbox

A real viewer: arrow keys and on-screen arrows, Escape to close, focus returned to the opening frame, a film-strip of thumbnails with the current frame ringed in safelight red and auto-scrolled into view, and captions in EXIF register — frame count, title, stock, aperture. Type is Instrument Sans (tight, quiet) with Red Hat Mono as the contact-sheet voice. Photography from Unsplash (free license).

Process — three passes

Pass 1 (visual): one downloaded frame failed verification and was cut from the set; tall frames re-balanced so no column runs long.
Pass 2 (complexify): film-stock captions audited — black-and-white stocks had been attached to colour photographs; every EXIF line now names a colour emulsion a photographer would believe.
Pass 3 (QA): lightbox walked by script (open → arrow → filmstrip state), safelight screenshot-verified, 390px pass, zero console errors.

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