Photography has been my second leg next to IT consulting since 2006. Over the years the subjects have evolved — from quiet portraits through people-in-landscape work to studio productions. The way these images were presented on the web, however, did not keep pace with the editing craft behind them. The site relaunch was a good moment to give the photography section explicit attention.
A slider that lets the images breathe
On the photography page the gallery deliberately breaks out of the usual content container and takes the full screen width. Edge-to-edge — the only place on the site where that happens. The images shouldn't be squeezed into a column; they are the content.
Mechanics behind it:
- 42 slides at full resolution (1920×1280), lazy-loaded after the first,
- arrow keys and arrow buttons for prev / next,
- dots along the bottom edge as a visible table of contents,
- autoplay that pauses while the lightbox is open,
- soft cross-fade transitions via CSS keyframes.
Click, enlarge, click on
Every slide carries a visible caption overlay (multilingual — more on that in a moment) and an invisible button wrapper. A click opens the lightbox as a full-screen dialog over a dark backdrop: image centred and large, arrows left and right, close icon top right. The keyboard works the same way — arrow keys page through, Escape closes. A small stage layer briefly keeps the outgoing and incoming slide stacked during a transition so the change reads as soft rather than abrupt.
The same lightbox trick exists for images embedded directly in blog posts. A 50-line JS file delegates clicks on <img class="blog-img">, instantiates a native <dialog> node, centres the image — done. Try it: a click on any of the photographs here opens it large.
Captions in five languages
The photo slides each carry an alt text and a visible caption — both as a type-safe language record with five variants: German, English, Finnish, Polish, Japanese. Whoever lands on the Japanese version of the site sees Japanese captions, and a screen reader speaks the alt text in Japanese. Localisation down to the smallest detail.
(How the site even acquired Japanese in the first place is told in the Japantag post.)
A blog category of its own
Brand new: the photography blog overview. A filtered view of every blog post that falls into the photography category — fairly short for now, but that's going to change. Three small coloured chips (consulting, distribution, photography) already group the entries on the main overview; and the post you're reading is, in a sense, the first one in its own category track.
What's next
A few topics are already lined up for the next photography posts — on light shaping in a mobile-studio situation, on beauty retouching and when it helps (or actually hurts), on choosing an image look consciously. If you fancy coaching or a shoot together: I'd love to take your first step.