Shai Eynav's photos are some of the most impressive that we've ever seen. If you have any doubts, just check out the site right now. We knew the site had to pop, and when working with countless photographs the balance between has to tread lightly. So we made the photographs act as the design.
Simply put: photographs don't ordinarily look fantastic on a screen. They're meant to be printed. So trying to do justice to work that has to be re-sized and compressed is just a recipe for disaster. So we ignored as much of that as we could.
It is so strongly encouraged that you view Shai's photos as large as possible that we'll force your browser to do so.
We applyed over two dozen photographs throughout the site that are each over 2000 pixels wide. Zoom in to Shai's Wedding Panoramas to see for yourself. First you're going to notice that the site is in Flash. We chose to work in such a medium to replicate the experience of a real gallery as much as possible. No flashes to white or breaks in the experience. It was as important to Shai as it was for us.
As mentioned before, if the design looks "light" that's because it is. Not that we didn't labor over how to pull this all together, because we did. But simply having the unobtrusive permanent navigation bar anchored to the bottom of the screen was enough to hold down the experience. The photos speak for themselves, and the mission of the design was to put all focus into the photos.