These photos are real

Every PHOTOGRAPH on this page is a real shutter press, in a real place, at a real moment. No stock images, no restaged shots, no photo taken last month and posted today to fill a gap.

Since 12/08/2026 the page carries a second kind, and we are saying so here rather than letting you find out: DRAWINGS. The artisan sketches the box, tests dimensions, lays out compositions, tries patterns — using machine tools to do those things faster. That is real work from these seventeen days, and leaving it out would leave a hole in the story. But a drawing is not allowed to pass for a photograph: it carries a "Concept sketch" label inside the frame, built from data rather than from typed text so nobody can forget it; it has no "Shot at…" line because the database refuses to store a capture time for a drawing; and a day holding only drawings leaves its enamel cell unfired. A cell on the strip only takes its glaze colour on a day that has photographs — a day holding only drawings stays bare copper, exactly like an enamel panel wired but not yet filled.

The line is drawn at what an image is doing, not at what made it. Photos of the workshop, the team, the artisan and the finished product must still be real — no exceptions, not even when time is short.

Cameras and phones write the moment of capture into the image file itself, in a block of data called EXIF. Our upload pipeline reads that block before it does anything else. If the capture time is missing, the photo is refused on the spot and the sender gets a line saying exactly what was missing. The time printed under each photo — “Taken 14:23 · 19/08/2026” — is the time the camera recorded as the shutter fired, not the time we published it.

The rule blocks the most convenient shortcuts first. Images re-downloaded from Zalo or Facebook come back stripped of EXIF, so they cannot be posted at all; you have to go back to the device and fetch the original file. On a day when nobody photographs anything, that day's cell stays empty, says “No photos on this day”, and sits there for the rest of the seventeen days. That gap makes us as uncomfortable as it makes you. We leave it in.

Now the part that has to be said plainly: EXIF can be edited. An image built by a generative model can be given a fabricated capture time, and our filter will wave it through. This fence stops carelessness and it stops accidents — the wrong file picked out of a library, an old photo posted by mistake, an image that took a detour through social media and came back. It does not stop somebody determined to fake one. We also keep the original file and a SHA-256 hash of every image so a claim can be checked later, but that is still short of an absolute guarantee, and we would rather say so than let you assume otherwise.

Why go to this much trouble: we are making a box by hand and asking a price that is not small, and the thing standing behind that price is the actual work of each day. Told through staged photographs, that work turns back into advertising, and anyone can write advertising. A photograph with the capture time welded to it costs far more: it requires that somebody was standing there, at that exact moment.

If a photo here looks doubtful to you, write to us. We still hold the original file, and we will answer with data rather than with reassurance.