Miami Events Photographer Portfolio and Appointment Booking

This is a full-stack web application built for a high-end event photographer serving corporate events, private celebrations, and luxury gatherings across South Florida. The public site is designed as a cinematic, scroll-driven experience that showcases photography and videography work, while a protected admin area lets the business owner manage galleries, availability, and bookings without touching code.

The project combines a visually distinctive frontend with a practical operations layer: online booking, calendar sync, transactional email, and cloud media storage.

Key Features

Public Website

• Immersive single-page experience with GSAP ScrollTrigger animations, pinned sections, and smooth transitions between content areas
• Animated loading screen with image preloading for a polished first impression
• Interactive hero with a 3D-style ring carousel of portfolio images
• Photography gallery with category filtering, lightbox viewing, and scroll-pinned layout
• Videography gallery with category filters and video playback
• About section with scroll-reveal storytelling
• Contact form with server-side validation and email notifications
• Integrated booking flow: interactive calendar, time-slot picker, availability checks, and booking submission

Booking & Operations

• End-to-end booking system with date/time validation against configured availability
• Owner confirmation workflow with automated confirmation emails to clients
• Secure booking management links (manage, cancel) via token-based URLs
• iCloud Calendar (CalDAV) integration — confirmed bookings are added to the owner’s calendar automatically
• Eastern Time (America/New_York) handling across the booking logic for consistent scheduling

Gallery Manager (Custom Admin)

• Passkey-based authentication (Better Auth) for secure, passwordless admin access
• Photography gallery: upload, reorder (drag-and-drop), delete, and category management
• Videography gallery: large-file uploads via presigned URLs to Cloudflare R2
• Ring carousel management for the homepage hero
• Calendar configuration: mark full days or specific time slots as unavailable
• Bookings dashboard for reviewing and confirming client requests

Content Management

• Payload CMS 3 as the headless backend (MongoDB)
• Globals for gallery content and carousel configuration
• Collections for bookings, calendar rules, media, and users
• Automatic image optimization (Sharp) — WebP variants for grid and lightbox display