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No.73 · Cards

Instant Photo

A print that develops in your hand: it comes out a murky brown-grey, the darks come up first, then the colour floods in until the evening is all there. Shake it — drag it about — and it develops faster, swinging as you go; then a caption is written along the bottom in pen.

The prompt

Written for the variant you picked above: Corniche

Build an instant-photo card that develops. Card: a figure styled as an instant print — warm off-white paper with a subtle radial sheen, 16px borders with a deeper bottom for the caption, a soft lifted shadow, rotated −3°. The photo is a square hand-built SVG scene with role="img" and a real alt text; a gloss gradient lies over it. Developing: a --dev value goes 0 → 1 over ~6.5s in a rAF loop (it starts when the card is 40% in view and stops when done). The scene's filter is contrast(0.35 + 0.65·min(1, 1.6·dev)) saturate(1.43·max(0, dev − 0.3)) brightness(0.55 + 0.45·dev) sepia(0.6·(1 − dev)) — so the darks come up first, then the colour — and a murky brown-grey layer fades out with (1 − dev)^1.5. Shake: dragging the card (pointer capture, touch-action none) moves it a little (clamped ±60/±40px, drifting back when let go), kicks a rotational spring (k 90, c 9) with the horizontal speed, and adds to a "shake" level that multiplies the development rate up to 4× and decays. When it's done, the caption is revealed left to right by a clip-path sweep in an italic serif in blue pen, slightly rotated, and the date fades in. A polite status line reads "Developing… shake it to hurry it along" then "Developed"; "Take another" ejects a fresh print (slide-in) and develops it again. Reduced motion: developed and captioned at once. Selected variant — Corniche: scene="corniche": the Mutrah corniche at dusk — the fort on its hill, a dhow under sail and the sun setting on the water; caption "Mutrah, staying out late".

Notes

Interaction
Watch it develop; drag it about to shake it faster; Take another for a fresh print.
Motion
Development ~6.5s (up to 4× faster when shaken); swing spring k 90 c 9; caption written over 1.6s.
Accessibility
The scene has descriptive alt text, the caption is real text in a figcaption, and the status is announced politely. Reduced motion shows the finished print.
Responsive
The print is min(300px, 80vw) wide; the SVG scales with it.
On touch
Drag with a finger to shake it (touch-action: none on the print only).

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301 components