Feature-length documentaries get the awards. Short ones get watched. Under ten minutes, you can make a serious film that someone will start on their lunch break and actually finish. The constraint helps. With ten minutes you can't wander. You need one person, one place, one problem. A fisherman whose harbor is silting up. A bakery that opens at 3 a.m. A town that lost its only … [Read more...] about The Case for Short Documentaries Under Ten Minutes
Media
JPEG, WebP or AVIF: What Each Format Does to Your Images
Image formats decide how big your files are and how good they look. For a gallery site, that's most of the battle. JPEG has been around since the early 1990s. It's lossy, meaning it throws away detail the eye is unlikely to miss to get a smaller file. Every browser and every device opens it. It's the safe default. The newer options WebP came out of Google and usually beats JPEG … [Read more...] about JPEG, WebP or AVIF: What Each Format Does to Your Images
Thumbnails Are the Real Gallery: How to Design a Grid That Gets Clicked
Most visitors never see your full-size images. They see the grid. If the grid doesn't work, the rest of the gallery might as well not exist. The first choice is uniform crops or original proportions. Uniform squares look tidy, and they're easy to build. They also cut off heads, horizons and the details that make a photo interesting. A masonry layout keeps each image's … [Read more...] about Thumbnails Are the Real Gallery: How to Design a Grid That Gets Clicked