Who I am

I am Jernej Letica, a photographer and a developer.

Photography came first. The programming came later, and mostly out of necessity — I wanted a website for my photographs, then I wanted it to work properly, and eventually building things became its own interest alongside taking pictures.

Those two sides explain this site better than anything else about me. I photograph and write about photographing; when a small task keeps getting in the way, I build a tool for it instead of looking for one.

There is no company behind this and no plan to become one.

What this site is

Three things that turned out to belong together.

Free tools that do small image jobs in your browser. Practical guides about photography itself — light, settings, editing, the things that do not change when the gear does. And location articles about places worth photographing, with the specific viewpoints rather than a general recommendation to visit.

They belong together because they come from the same habit: going somewhere, photographing it, then needing to do something with the file afterwards.

Why the tools exist

Most of them started the same way. I needed to resize a photograph for a website, crop one to a specific ratio, or pull a colour out of an image — and found myself uploading a file to a site covered in advertisements, waiting, closing a notification request, and hoping the photograph was being handled reasonably.

None of those jobs need a server. A browser can do them.

So the tools here run entirely on your device. Your photograph is opened, processed and saved without ever being sent anywhere. That is not a privacy promise printed under an upload button — it is how they are built, and you can watch the network panel while you use them.

There are six so far:

I wrote about how they came about in I built the tools I kept looking for as a photographer.

I would rather have a small collection I understand than hundreds of pages of variations on the same calculator. Each of these came from something I actually needed twice.

What local processing really means

The phrase appears on a lot of websites that do upload your file. Here is what it means on this one.

When you choose an image, the browser decodes it in memory on your machine. The work — resizing, cropping, re-encoding — happens there. The result is offered back to you as a download. At no point is the file transmitted, and there is no server-side code that could receive it even if something went wrong.

The practical consequences are worth knowing. There is no file size limit imposed by an upload. The tools work after the page has loaded even if the connection drops. Nothing is queued, stored or deleted later, because nothing arrives anywhere in the first place.

The trade-off is that very large files depend on your device rather than a server, so an old phone will be slower than a laptop.

What I write about

Photography — the fundamentals I keep returning to. What bokeh actually is and how to get it without faking it in software. Aperture, which controls more than brightness. Shutter speed and what it does to movement. Editing photographs in GIMP, which is what I use when I do not want to pay a subscription to finish a picture.

Travel photography — where to stand, when to go, and what the light does when you get there. The Brooklyn Bridge has eleven viewpoints and most people photograph one of them. Santa Monica Pier becomes a different subject between afternoon and blue hour. The Eiffel Tower has a night-lighting copyright rule most guides never mention. Lake Jasna, fifteen minutes from Kranjska Gora, is the one I keep going back to.

Interviews — conversations with photographers whose work I admire, about how they actually work rather than what equipment they own. These are the pieces I would keep if I had to delete everything else.

Guides — the longer practical pieces. Street photography ideas for when you need a reason to go out and a way to look once you are there. Posting times for when the studies contradict each other, which they do.

Stories — the pieces that are neither instruction nor destination guide.

Where to start

If you photograph and want to improve something today, start with bokeh or aperture.

If you are going somewhere, the location guides are written to be read before the trip and used during it — Brooklyn Bridge is the most detailed.

If you came for a tool, the tools page is the shortest route.

How I work

I update articles rather than republish them. When a place changes — and places do change; Austin's Graffiti Park moved across the city and the original site was demolished — the old article gets corrected rather than quietly left with a stale date on it.

If I have not been somewhere recently, I say so rather than implying a visit. If a photograph is not mine, I do not suggest otherwise. If a tool cannot do something, its page says that instead of promising it and failing later.

Where an article states a fact that can go out of date — opening hours, prices, access rules — I try to link to the official source rather than becoming one. Those pages change more often than mine.

The site itself

I built the site as well as the tools. No page builder, no theme, no plugins; it is a small amount of PHP that I understand entirely, which is the only way I know to keep something fast for years rather than months.

It runs without a cookie banner and without a consent wall, because it does not do the things that would require one. There are no advertisements, and there is no newsletter that turns out to be the real reason the article exists.

There is analytics, because I would like to know which articles are worth improving.

Contact

The tools are free and will stay free.

If one of them does something strange, if a guide sends you to a place that has since closed, or if you spot something that is simply wrong, I would rather hear about it than not. Corrections are how the older articles stay worth reading.

Get in touch.