MONT MERCIER
[
Fine-Art Photography
]
NIGHT BLOOM
A PORTFOLIO AND PRINT SHOP FOR A NATURE PHOTOGRAPHER WHO WORKS WHERE LIGHT BARELY REACHES.
[
Project data
]
MONT MERCIER
Fine-Art Photography
Title
NIGHT BLOOM
Client
MONT MERCIER
Released
Timeframe
9 weeks
Project type
Web
Technology
Framer Shopify (prints) Cloudinary Lenis
[
01 — Overview
]
Mont Mercier photographs what most people never see — bioluminescent life at depth, alpine forests before dawn, storm light over open water. His work lived on a stock portfolio theme that treated every frame the same size and the same speed. We built him a digital home that behaves like the work: dark by default, one image at a time, motion slow enough to let a photograph finish. The print shop sits behind the portfolio rather than in front of it.
[
02 — The challenge
]
THE WORK WITHOUT THE TEMPLATE
Nature photography portfolios mostly look identical: a white grid, a lightbox, a contact form.
Mont Mercier's archive spans ten years of expedition work — underwater, high altitude, arctic coastline — and every frame was shot to be seen large and alone. The existing site put sixty thumbnails on one page and let the browser decide the crop, so the pictures competed with each other and lost. He also sells limited-edition prints, which the old site handled with a link to a third-party store that looked nothing like the work. We needed one place that could carry the archive, the editions and the story of how each image was made.
[
03 — The solution
]
ONE FRAME AT A TIME
A dark, single-image portfolio that moves at the pace of the photographs, with the print shop built into the same system.
We rebuilt the portfolio around full-bleed sequences — one photograph per screen, edge to edge, captions held back until the image has landed. Series are organised by place and light rather than by date: Deep Water, Before Dawn, Weather, Ice. Motion is deliberately slow; nothing slides in, everything fades. The print shop uses the same frames. Each edition page shows the photograph large, the paper and edition size beneath it, and the field notes from the day it was shot — so buying a print feels like a continuation of looking, not a switch to a catalogue.
Series pages built as full-bleed sequences, one photograph per screen.
Edition pages that keep the photograph first and the shop second.
[
04 — Performance results
]
SEEN LARGE, THEN BOUGHT
The site launched with the Deep Water series and became the archive's main sales channel within its first quarter — with no paid promotion.
Print sales
3.4×
Against the previous store in the first quarter
Average session
6:48
Up from under two minutes on the old portfolio
Gallery inquiries
2
From the site in the first month — one now represents him
The series structure has since taken in two new expeditions without a redesign — new work drops into the same frames.
[
05 — Final thoughts
]
Photographs made at night, in the dark and in the deep, deserved a site that stayed dark. Everything else followed from that.
[
Credits
]
Zélie Jade Nigel Cole
Art Direction Content & Field Notes Development Project Lead
