Desanmi Photography

Overview

Desanmi is a Lagos portrait and wedding photographer, known for directed, studio-lit portraits on painted backdrops and for weddings under The Desanmi Weddings. This photography portfolio website brings both sides together: birthdays, convocations, bridal looks and full wedding days, each with a clear way to book.

The challenge

Instagram shows a photographer's work but not the process: what each session includes, how the look gets planned, or how to ask about a date. The site had to put the photographs first, explain the sessions plainly, credit the makeup artists, stylists and planners Desanmi works alongside, and make the next step (a message) effortless.

What I built

• A hero with three switchable layouts (drifting photo columns, a dealt card deck or a captioned slideshow), chosen in the CMS
• "What I shoot": four session types, where hovering over or opening a row swaps the photo
• A pinned, sideways-scrolling selected-work gallery and a filterable story archive with a lightbox
• A four-step "How a session works" section, from first message to retouched photographs
• A strip crediting collaborating creatives, plus a rotating spotlight of client comments from Instagram
• A dedicated section for The Desanmi Weddings
• A contact form that composes the enquiry (session, date, number of people) into a WhatsApp message or email

Design & build

A near-black canvas lets the photographs carry the colour, with a warm bronze accent that echoes studio light and Plus Jakarta Sans for clean, modern type. A custom cursor labels photos and cards, headings rise word by word, and the closing call to action trails photos behind the pointer.

It's built with Astro and Keystatic: every story, session and line of home-page copy lives in an editable content file, and Astro's image pipeline serves responsive sizes so large portraits stay fast. Lenis handles smooth scrolling, and looping animations pause when they're off screen to keep the page light.

What it delivers

The concept gives Desanmi a portfolio that does more than display images. It explains the offer, shows the process, credits collaborators and ends every path in a booking message, so enquiries arrive with the session type and date already filled in. New stories can go up from the CMS without a developer. More on how I build these as multi-page websites.