m̌ ḫ's photos

Mae Salong (Santikhiri) in northern Thailand was once a Kuomintang stronghold that depended heavily on opium, but from the 1970s the Thai state and royal projects pushed a shift toward legal highland crops. Today the area is known for high‑mountain Arabica coffee grown alongside oolong tea and temperate fruits at around 1 200–1 400 m, where the cool, humid climate suits these crops. Coffee is farmed mainly by smallholders, usually in mixed agroforestry plots with fruit or timber trees that provide shade, protect the steep slopes, and give families additional income sources. The plantings are all Arabica, using locally adapted varieties that cope well with the altitude and local diseases. Farmers hand‑pick only fully ripe cherries and usually use washed processing, which yields clean, bright coffees with medium body and flavors often described as cherry, cocoa, dark chocolate, citrus, and sugarcane. Mae Salong coffee is often sold as a single‑origin, light‑to‑medium roast that showcases the character of the place rather than heavy roast notes. Coffee now sits alongside tea and Chinese‑heritage tourism as a pillar of the local, post‑opium highland economy.

While “letter catching” again (as explained here ), I accidentally trapped something that wasn’t quite the intended target — this frame. It technically breaks my own rules — the “H” only appears on the sides — so maybe it doesn’t really count. Maybe it’s just a one-step ladder… or something in between. Anyway, at least there’s some nice bubble bokeh to save the day!

In the Little Carpathians, spiders are one of those quiet helpers most people walk past without a second thought. Their webs may seem like nothing more than thin threads between branches, but behind them is a patient hunter that spends every day catching flies, mosquitoes, moths and small plant‑eating insects. Over time, this constant, unnoticed work protects leaves, young shoots and tree bark, and it does so without any human intervention or chemicals. At the same time, spiders themselves feed birds and small mammals, so they pass the energy they have collected further into the forest community. When you add it all up, these small, easily overlooked animals help keep the woods healthier and more balanced than they would be without them.

Avion is a modernist residential and commercial block in Bratislava, built in the early 1930s for a cooperative of railway workers during a period of rapid change between the wars. The building often serves as a straightforward introduction both to his architecture and to the wider story of Bratislava’s transformation into a modern Central European capital in the interwar years. It stands just outside the historic centre, with a continuous line of shops and services at street level and long ranges of flats above, planned for good light, fresh air and everyday comfort. The design follows functionalist ideas: plain rectangular masses, flat roofs, smooth façades and deep, regular balconies and loggias that give the building a clear profile. Inside, efficient layouts, large windows, central heating and modern bathrooms represented new standards of healthy middle-class city living and made the scheme one of the most advanced housing projects in Slovakia at the time. Its architect, Jozef Marek, was part of a younger generation in interwar Czechoslovakia who treated building as a means of social improvement rather than a stage for historical ornament. By designing for railway employees, he worked directly with an emerging urban middle class that wanted better homes, more services and a modern city around them. This block is widely seen as his key work because it sums up his approach in one clear example: technically up to date, socially engaged and confident in its urban presence, adapting international functionalist ideas to local conditions in Bratislava.

At some point, a walk in the Small Carpathians stopped being just a walk and turned into a question: what if the forest is already writing, and I simply have to learn to read it? From that moment, every birch and beech became a fragment of script, each bend of a trunk a hesitant stroke of an unseen hand. This project follows those signs: an alphabet grown from bark and shadow, traced in natural light and recorded with as little interference as possible. Letter by letter, image by image, the familiar hills turn into a quiet manuscript, inviting the viewer not only to look, but to slowly decipher the language of the woods.