Why I built In Frame Before Dark

I have tens of thousands of photographs.

Most of them have lived the same life: memory card, Lightroom, export, maybe a text message or a post, then silence.

Social media never felt like the right archive for them. Everything is temporary there. A photograph gets a few seconds, maybe a few days, and then the feed keeps moving.

I wanted somewhere slower.

In Frame Before Dark is a place for the photographs that still matter after the trip is over, but it is also a challenge to myself: curate harder, write more, and stop letting finished work disappear into folders.

The site had to be easy to maintain or I knew I would eventually stop using it.

That decision shaped the technical side as much as the design.

Field Notes are Markdown files. Portfolio metadata lives in a typed manifest. Full-resolution originals stay in Lightroom and Google Drive. Only curated web exports reach GitHub. Every meaningful change goes through a branch, asset validation, a production build and review before Render deploys it.

The result is intentionally simple:

shoot → curate → optimize → write → review → publish

No CMS dashboard. No giant framework. No reason to avoid updating the site because the machinery got in the way.

The design follows the same rule.

Dark background. Quiet interface. Monospace system language. A little cyan. A few game-like details if you know where to look.

Then get out of the photograph’s way.

The goal is not to post everything.

It is to build an archive that gets better as I do.