Michael Wilkins Photography

Michael Wilkins Photography is our founder's own fine-art practice: wildlife, cityscapes, landscapes, aerial, dogs, action sports and astrophotography, shot on a Canon EOS-1D X Mark II and sold as prints, for licensing and, from London, as commissions in the UK and Europe.

A photography site is one of the hardest to make fast, because the product is the image and every page is heavy by nature. A template gallery usually trades one for the other: full-quality photographs that load slowly, or quick pages that flatten the work. It also gives search engines little to read, since a grid of images with no titles, captions or alt text is invisible to the searches that sell prints. The site is our own, so the brief was ours to set, and we set it where we would set a client's: full-quality photographs, fast on a phone, and every photograph findable on its own.

The site is written from scratch in Next.js, with no gallery plugin and no theme, around a single publishing loop. A photograph goes in once. A build step makes AVIF and WebP copies at up to four widths, from 480 to 2,048 pixels, so a phone downloads a size it can actually show, and the photograph gets its own page with its title, place, camera settings and the story behind it. There are 268 of them across seven genres, with seven curated series, 2,080 image files in all, and the print shop sits on the same records.

The build refuses bad content. A photograph without alt text, or without its image files, fails the build on purpose, and one too small to print well can never be sold as a print. Titles and descriptions are written by rules that are themselves tested: a photograph's title adds the place, a print's title leads with the subject a buyer searches for, the description is the alt text rather than a one-line caption, and nothing is ever cut off mid-word. The site carries 67 automated tests in all.

The homepage opens on a film that walks into the camera, through the lens, the aperture and the mirror box, and out into the work, drawn frame by frame as the visitor scrolls: 127 frames, fetched as the visitor approaches them rather than all at once. Under reduced motion the film still follows the visitor's scroll, but its zoom, its drifting text and any autoplay are switched off.