Title: P - PHOTOS, PICASA, AND POSTCARDS
Tags: camera, hobby, photography
Blog Entry: I have always had a deep fascination with cameras and photos, now evidensed by the bookshelves and boxes filled with photo albums. My mother had a Kodak box camera when I arrived, but took only pictures that she could afford to have developed. I still remember the film, rolled on a spindle, and carefully mounted in her camera. I believe that there were 12 pictures on a roll, which was then taken to town, to the drug store to be developed. She would carefully preserved each picture in the family photo album, anchored with photo corners on black pages. To this day, the quality of those photos remain sharp and clear. When I entered Nursing Training in 1958, there were only two in my class who owned a camera. Colored slides were the new format, and I took lots of pictures. In 2008, when our class celebrated our 50 th Anniversary, I scanned the slides to digital files, and burned them on CDs as a gift for my classmates, which was happily received. It was a timely decision, because the colors had faded over time. I’m sure the CDs are tucked away in many a “memory box”. Picaso was my digital tool of choice, and even though it has recently been replaced by bigger and better software, I still use it, along with Google Photos. There is so much to choose from these days, and I’m sure that we all have a variety of favorite tools on our computers. Postcards became one of my “unexpected and delightful” hobbies. I didn’t even know that people actually collected postcards until several years ago, when hubby and I dropped in on an Estate Sale. It was the last day, and we didn’t expect to see much of interest, but... you never know what will catch our eye! In a back room of the house, I spotted a large shoe box filled with very old postcards. An attached note stated that the cards had been collected by a World War 1 soldier, serving in Europe. The price for the collection was $70.00. I told myself that the price was the reason the cards were still available; who would ever pay that price for used postcards?) A staff lady of the company in charge of the sale approached me, asking if I was interested in the collection. Yes, it is interesting, because of my love of “anything” vintage, but I couldn’t afford the price. She asked if I had any cash in my wallet, because she was open to offers. I checked, and I had $12.35. She told me that I could have the card collection for $10.00. Why not, I told myself; it would be a cheap bit of entertainment for my curious mind. The more I learned about postcards, the more I realized that I indeed found a treasure. Small books of sepia photos, with onion skin paper separating each photo, and hand-colored photos were in the collection of many locations in Europe. There were also postcards of areas in Canada, that the owner had collected during his training days. Two cards in particular caught my eye... one was taken at a coal mine in my hometown (noted on the back of the card was where the owner had worked as a teen), and one of the Banff Springs Hotel, built in the late 1800s by Canadian Pacific Railway. The postcard was dated 1907, and the hotel was less than half the size that it is today. Wow! Being that I had been doing consignment selling on Ebay, I decided to see if that card would be saleable. In one week, I was paid four times what I had paid for the whole collection. THAT GOT MY ATTENTION!
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