Conti and the Canon
Carina Conti is a photographer, actor, and dancer based in Los Angeles, shooting creative portraits, headshots, families, couples, events, and brand work. She bought our Squarespace Template Indie Studio and built the site herself, and what she made with it has a personality all its own.
The palette is gold, forest green, and warm cream, with a paper-grain texture running underneath. It reads as vintage without tipping into costume, and it gives her photography a warm surround rather than competing with it. The gold is the loudest element, carrying the headlines, the testimonial band, and the footer, with the green stepping in for the calls to action.
What makes the site distinctive is the collage treatment. Photographs sit at slight angles with torn paper edges, strips of washi tape, pressed flowers, and scattered petals layered around them. Illustrated cameras, a Polaroid, and a scrap of newsprint turn up in the margins. It’s a scrapbook logic, the kind of thing you’d make by hand on a table, and it fits a photographer whose whole pitch is authenticity over polish.
The risk with that much decoration is that the work gets buried. It doesn’t here, because the actual photography is always given a clean frame. The services page runs a grid of portraits with no embellishment at all, and the About page uses two full-width filmstrips of her work, five and six images across, that stop the ornament and let the images speak.
The About page is the most interesting part of the site. Rather than a standard bio, it’s built around her self-portraiture, with a section titled “Why all the Self-Portraits?” explaining that she started shooting herself to understand what it feels like to be in front of a camera. It’s a strong argument for hiring her, made sideways, and it’s paired with a run of her own self-portraits that doubles as a portfolio.
Social proof is handled generously and in two registers. A Trustmary review carousel appears on all three pages with star ratings and full client reviews, and separately there are pull quotes set in large serif type against torn paper and dried flowers. One does the credibility work, the other does the feeling.
The services page keeps six offerings in alternating image-and-text blocks, each with a short line and a Book button: Creative Portraits, Headshots, Family Sessions, Couples, Events, and brand photography. The descriptions are brief, a sentence each, which keeps the page scannable and sends people to the contact form rather than trying to close the sale on the page. An FAQ accordion at the bottom handles the practical questions about travel, turnaround, editing, and RAW files.
The result is a site that looks handmade in the way a good scrapbook does, and that argues for Carina’s approach to photography just by existing.
