I’ve seen these illustrations, and few others, in “My Modern Met“. All these are made by graphic designer David Olenick. He gives “anima” to certain objects or animals and they …talk! He perfectly illustrates the humor of bad decisions, excuses, and basic human behavior as described in his biography.
I expose some that made me smile, laugh or cry.
You could buy a postcard from many places and send one to your mates, family or boyfriend or girlfriend. You can chose from a special topic, a vintage photo of your city or the city you are at this moment; you can send a flower or your favorite animal; you can even send a vintage humor postcard to make fun of your friends. Try it. It’s really GREAT experience!
Let’s see some history…
In 1861, John Charlton of Philadelphia created the first private postal card and applied for a patent on Dec. 17, 1861. He sold the idea to H. L. Lipman, who printed cards marked “Lipman’s Postal Cards.”
Government postcards came onto the market in 1873. Postcards were novelties because of the pictures and designs that they used. By 1907, millions of postcards were in circulation, and in 1906, Eastman Kodak made a camera called the “Folding Pocket Camera” to create postcards out of photographs. “Postal Card” quickly became a term reserved to cards printed by the Post Office. Privately printed cards which required stamps for posting were called “private mailing cards” and later “postcards.” “Postal card,” or “postal,” is still a term most appropriately applied to a particular type of official postal stationery.
Deltiology is the collection and study of postcards. A person who conducts research on postcards is called a deltiologist. In Greek, deltiology means the science or study of small pictures or cards (deltion).
Quite small, the space on the back of a postcard can often seem intimidating. It wouldn’t take a great deal of imagination to write a message that didn’t require privacy on one side of a stiff card, address and stamp the other side, and put in the mail. But I’m sure you can figure that out!
You could check out some in my Shop on eCharta:
Cities from all over the world
Humor postcards – great ideas!
Collect your ships…
“It’s heaven when you find romance on your menu”
“Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.”
Postcards are visual artifacts of history, and, depicting images that range from pictures to paintings, they are also a form of art. Let’s not lose this great experience from our lives.
It’s up to us…
This is another of my Squidoo posts that has been banned! I guess these guys hate strawberries!!!
The Fragaria × ananassa, commonly known as strawberry in addition to being consumed fresh, can be frozen, made into preserves, as well as dried and used in prepared foods, such as cereal bars. You can plant it yourself in your garden and you can eat all the fruit by yourself!
But I thought to approach the subject from another angle. To find our favorite fruit on …paper! So searching around, I found that the material is … a lot! The small Strawberry is imprinted in all kinds of paper! On stamps, on postcards, in books and posters, and many other paper prints or crafts! Amazing! Isn’t it?
Some paper items on eCharta:
An antique print of Perrin Ltd of 1914 of the strawberry plant
One of my postcards of Strawberry Cactus (!)
An antique print of 1886 of an agriculture strawberry picking scene in July
Enjoy some with cream in Wimbledon…
Primarolia
Some more nice New York City old views. Times Square, 1935. Betty Boop CARTOON on the marquee from Paramount Theater. The Hotel Astor you see in the upper corner came down mid-sixties, along with Penn Station and Singer Building. Not a good time for beaux-arts. We miss them now. Don’t we?
Cheers
Primarolia
Everybody knows when he plans to travel in Greece that is an amazing mix of ancient historical sites and modern conveniences and activities. While in Greece, you can explore ruins dating back thousands of years, stay in a sleek, ultra-modern hotel, or in a traditional one and spend your days on the beach enjoying the sun, surf and …taking pictures.
But besides that you can enjoy meals prepared the way Greeks have been for hundreds of years made from local products, and dance the night away in any of the numerous bars and clubs.
So we did so! Yesterday we visited a nice seaside cafe-bar-restaurant in Western Peloponnese close to Patras, named “Coralli” on Niforeika beach. We started drinking iced-coffee and we ended drinking beers and any liqueur around! Great place, great time, great sea, great Greece.
DON’T FORGET to take your camera along to capture moments you’ll want to remember always as a souvenir of your trip to Greece. We will stay until the end of August. So I share many unique photos I take.
Stay in touch and enjoy…
Primarolia
Broome St. in SoHo circa 1935. You can make your signs here!
Old photographs, especially black and white but not only, are always inspiring. At least when I have one in front of me, I can’t help reminiscing other times, trying to find myself in the position of these people I see on it or even mentally “walk” those streets and live a bit of the past itself.
A panoramic New York view from Fairchild Zeppelin in 1931
The photographs of New York have a special place in my heart. These are the streets I walk and love; are the paths that they have their own story, the roads walked by native New Yorkers such as Woody Allen, Alec Baldwin, Tony Bennett, James Caan, Maria Callas, Sofia Coppola, George Gershwin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Tom Cruise, Humphrey Bogart, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Michael Jordan, Lucille Ball, Al Capone, Jennifer Lopez, Chevy Chase, Billy Crystal, Robert de Niro, Kirk Douglas, Robert Downey Jr., Mel Gibson, Melanie Griffith, Rudolph Giuliani, Whoopi Goldberg, Eddie Murphy, Harvey Milk, Herman Melville, Billy the Kid, Marx Brothers, Stan Lee, Burt Lancaster, Stanley Kubrick, Lady Gaga, Scarlett Johansson, Rita Hayworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump, Barbra Streisand, Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, Franklin D. & Theodore Roosevelt, Lou Reed, Al Pacino and the list goes on and on…
“The Godfather” the crime film directed by Francis Ford Coppola premieres in a Broadway theater on March 15, 1972. A great time patina…
Having some old but extraordinary photographs of the city, I thought that perhaps the reprints will be for others a special case of an excavation memories. So I want to print them on high quality paper and sell them without a profit (!) on my eCharta Shop. I’ll do that soon!
The pieces are a whole heap! I’ll show some in this blog for time to time and the rest you’ll find them on my eCharta Shop.
Cheers
Primarolia
Is Coffee a necessity of life, or an indispensable pleasure?
It is certainly a pleasant thing. Conversation flows over a pot of coffee, yes?
I took a picture outside of my coffee shop. Well, it’s not mine! This is the coffee shop I buy my coffee every day. Nice picture down to the point, huh?
Enjoy yours…
Primarolia
Me and my wife we love photography. We love to shoot anything with any camera we’re holding at that moment. We know that moments are unique. We live them once in our life time. No moment is repeated. That’s it. Once. You have it or you lose it forever. So, we agreed always have our camera with us without lugging our whole photo bag or a tripod around like a tourist in our own town; just have our camera body and one lens handy.
This is Mercer street NYC just few hours before Sandy hit!
On the street was just me and my wife! Sunday morning is quite unusual 🙂
We took some pictures in the day Sandy hurricane was approaching NYC. It sucks walking in the street and seeing something awesome and not having my camera with me to capture that perfect slice of time!But I had it at this particular moment. And you can see Mercer street empty just a few hours before Sandy hits.
This is a street photography and I believe street photography is all about photographer’s vision for the streets and people’s lives. Satoki Nagata the photographer from Chicago said: “There is no debate between candid or posed. Portrait or not. Not about “decisive moment”, wide lens or not, not about DSLR or rangefinder, hipshot or not, prefocus or not. These debates are meaningless “details” and useless to make better images. Related with other genre, street photography is the one with no constraint.” But there is just one question to be answered; what the photographer’s vision to the world is. Because the street IS our world we’re living in. If the photographer has no vision, image becomes nothing more than snap shot.
I took this photo some time ago in West Village fire station. It’s just an iPhone shot! Nothing special. But I loved the color!
My wife was born in Greece and we return often there. Greece is a magic place to shoot! Sometimes I think that I have to shoot every second that passes by. It is amazing place to discover your vision. Your real photographic talent and a way to approach humans in every day life. The Greek islands are very famous and unique. Many photographers want to go there and shoot the hell out of them. There are just …right. We were in Santorini couple of years ago and we took over 3000 shots. We just kept the good ones. They were about 2987! It is amazing that you can’t erase a thing. But as “photographers” that we beleive that we are unique individuals we see the world differently than anyone else (well, everyone with a camera in hand has to beleive that) we selected about 250. After each shoot me and my wife, Maria, come back and look at our images and talk about what we could have done better and what worked. It’s exciting and inspirational not to mention fun! The Santorini experience was the most difficult one.
The famous Santorini sunset. We couldn’t miss that. This is a shot selected among 119 others.
I don’t do it for money …yet. It started as a self-expression. And still is. I recently shared an auction platform, eCharta, that you can sell paper items ONLY! I now have a Store with paper collectables. I’m going to upload my picture too. Soon. In this blog I decided to post our every day shooting experiences and I see how it goes. I’d love to hear your comments and your suggestions.
Cheers
Primarolia
Various online auction platforms are appearing from time to time trying to imitate other larger and established ones. The thing is that it is impossible to imitate eBay for example. How could you? How could you show up and have millions of products visited by millions of users? How is it possible to employ thousands of workers and be known in all countries of the world? Simply, it isn’t possible!
Therefore the approach should be different. You don’t need to compete with established auction platforms saying and proclaiming that you’re better because you have zero fees! Do you offer ALL their traffic AND their services for FREE? Of course not. And if you do how long can you afford it?
Recently I discovered a new auction platform, which it is really the same … but different. You can sell things that are only made of paper! The point is that this site does not advertise “free this” or “free that”! Of course it is much cheaper than the competition, but it doesn’t focus there. This site looks that was built from the ground up by professional programmers and designers. It has a very easy process to sell an item. It looks secure with high security standards. It offers different style of auctions such as BuyOut or Bid auction. eCharta has what you need.
You can create your own free Shop with your own custom categories and color it as you like. It has many Help pages but also its customer support it’s really fast and responsive. They are small
and flexible. They hear what you have to say. And above all they have a “mission statement” above and beyond “we’re cheaper than others.” That’s what I like about these guys!
I believe that eCharta honestly could become a viable eBay, Amazon or Etsy alternative! Well yes! Just for paper items. It has only been up 
and running as a Beta since mid-September. It officially started on 24th of March. There are already close to 17,000 items listed for sale in its 18 categories. Quite impressive, huh?
Many people claim they wish there were “real alternatives” to huge auction platforms like eBay; more “human” more family business. But they don’t have to expect “other people” to make the changes happen. Who is this “other people”? It’s US! WE have to participate. That’s how changes happen. Change happens because people get involved in making change happen.
I do participate. I put some items out for sale that you can see them on my Shop. Some of them have already sold. That was really great and a big surprise on new sites like this.
The “only paper” idea sounds really smart to me.
Even if most of the items listed on eCharta right now are paper collectibles such as stamps, comics, old prints and postcards, you can list any paper that you can think of: paper crafts, office supplies, tickets of a football game, cardboard to pack your stuff for moving, paper furniture etc.
Everyone knows that recycling paper conserves natural resources, saves a lot of energy and reduces greenhouse gas emissions. On eCharta you can “recycle” your paper. You can buy a paperback, read it and sell it back on eCharta! You can buy another one and do the same cycle once again. Don’t just through away a paper item. You sell it to someone that he could use it.
I like eCharta and the people who started it. I like their concept and I think eCharta is potentially very promising if not a revolutionary auction online platform. I like the way they’ve implemented it. It’s simple and great.
Another eCharta member said: “Be PART of a movement to create a genuine eBay alternative!”
I totally agree and I believe it deserves a try.
You can visit my eCharta Shop: Primarolia Collectibles
Cheers
Primarolia
PS: This is a post I first published on Squidoo. They UN-published it without a reason. I thank them very much because that was the initiative for this blog.
Just thought I ‘d let you know how much I’ve been disappointed so many times from Squidoo experience.
I published some lenses on Squidoo and I’m at level 45. Not a master but not bad at all.You can check them out HERE.
Last Monday I published a new one about a new eBay alternative, named eCharta. I’ve shared my lens through Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest, LinkedIn ect. It had 50 visits in the first day.
After TWO days they send me a notification that my lens has been unpublished from public view!!! All of sudden they say: “Since your lens is being unpublished for having large amounts of duplicate content, or for plagiarizing, and since both are against our Terms of Service, your lens will remain locked from view and eventually deleted.” But my lens was an original article of mine and I didn’t see where I was plagiarizing. Could you? I sent them 4 emails for a revision of the post and asking explanations. I never had an answer! Nothing! They just unpublished it AFTER TWO DAYS! Why they don’t check your lens BEFORE publishing it? Who’s responsible for that? An unbelievable censorship behavior! So, this is another important reason to start a blog of my own.
I googled my problem and – what a surprise! – some other stories same as mine came on my screen!
And goes on and on. 
These people they let you waste your time and then they block your stuff. Without a reason!
Friends, I prefer writing in this Blog! No more to say. Period.
Cheers
primarolia NYC 