Crafteako
where photography meets the web
fig. 1. field camera, bellows type. The instrument of observation.
Catalog of Work · R. Poudel, Collector · Lawrence, Kansas
Crafteako
where photography meets the web
- Collected
- field work, self-directed, 2024 –
- Locality
- Lawrence, KS
- Collectors
- R. Poudel (solo)
- Method
- ongoing practice
- Substrate
- HTML · CSS · JavaScript
- Status
- live
Field Notes
Crafteako is the home for my photography and videography. Every portfolio template I looked at felt generic (sliders, grids, lightboxes), so I built the site from scratch to give the work its own visual language.
No framework, deliberately. I had been writing React for months and wanted to rediscover what frameworks actually abstract. CSS Grid, custom properties, and the animation API turned out to cover far more ground than expected.
Photography sites are image-heavy by nature, so performance was a constraint from day one: lazy loading, responsive srcset sizing, and a Lightroom-to-Squoosh compression pipeline keep first load fast on slow connections.
Dissection
A static site with no build step. Custom CSS for layout and theming; JavaScript only where paper can't do the job (lightbox, contact form, scroll observation).
- Hand-written HTML/CSS
- Custom grid layouts, hand-tuned design tokens via custom properties, zero utility classes.
- Vanilla JavaScript
- Gallery lightbox, Intersection Observer scroll reveals, and form handling. Nothing else.
- Image pipeline
- Lightroom exports compressed with Squoosh, served with responsive srcset so each viewport gets the right size.
Annotations
This sheet is designed to be printed. ⌘P yields a catalog card.