Spero Haddad — Photography Portfolio

Overview

Spero Haddad Production is a visual production house led by photographer and filmmaker Spero Haddad, based in Damascus, Syria. It covers fashion editorials, food and hospitality, jewellery, architecture, weddings, content production and post-production. Gnolex designed and built the studio's website at sperohaddad.com, along with a custom content management system the studio uses to run the site day to day.

What we built

• Orbiting photo hero. The home page opens on a starfield. Round photo "plates" from the studio's archive circle the emblem, and clicking a plate opens it full screen with previous/next controls.
• "Floating Viewfinder" portfolio. The works archive is shown on the rear screen of a realistic camera body. A Stills mode presents photography and a Cinema mode presents video reels. Visitors get exposure readouts on the screen, previous/next/play controls, arrow-key shortcuts, a thumbnail filmstrip, a full-screen mode and optional shutter sounds.
• Filterable archive and project pages. The full catalogue can be filtered by discipline, sub-service and stills or cinema. Each project page shows the client, release season, discipline and status.
• Services and quote requests. Photography and Videography each have a detail page listing their sub-services and a "price upon request" quote form.
• Trust and conversion sections. These include a scrolling list of brands, the photographer's story and philosophy with key figures, press quotes, a Reviews page, an FAQ, and a production inquiry form on the home page and the Contact page.
• Fine art editions. A products section presents limited print editions.
• Custom CMS. The site runs on Gnolex's Laravel CMS. Its admin panel manages portfolio items and categories, services, quotations and orders, hero photos, client reviews (collected through private review links), FAQ, products, bookings, SEO and the XML sitemap, analytics, Excel import, and users and roles.

Design approach

The visual language draws on a photographer's darkroom. It uses near-black backgrounds, silver gradient headlines in Playfair Display, technical monospaced labels, glass-effect navigation and a faint film-grain overlay. The orbit and viewfinder ideas let the studio's own photographs carry every page, and both adapt to phone screens. Copy and interactions use camera terms throughout, such as "plates", "monographs", "Reserve Production" and the shutter-speed footer, so the site reads as one piece of art direction rather than a template.

Technology

• Laravel 12 (PHP 8.2+) with Blade templates and Gnolex's CMS
• Tailwind CSS with a custom dark theme and keyframe animations
• Vanilla JavaScript for the orbit hero, camera viewfinder, filters, lightbox and Web Audio shutter sounds
• Built-in SEO: meta tags, XML sitemap and robots.txt