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One of the most pricey and highly collected types of vintage postcards are those called Real Photo Postcards. Some real photo postcards on eBay net sales in the hundred-dollar range.

If your family has a photograph collection that dates back to the early 20th century, you may have stumbled across them. You may have found a photo of your great uncle Joe and noticed that the back is printed an official looking postcard stamp and address area– ready for mailing. As antiquarian book and paper dealers, we are always pleased to find an old real photo postcard in excellent condition.

These real photo postcards were a popular trend from the very early 20th century to as late as the 1950s, as the Playle Postcard Dealer's website http://www.playle.com/realphoto/ indicates on their dating chart for these cards. This was the same era during which the portable family camera flourished in popularity. Negatives of family photos would be sent out to photography houses which would print them up as postcards. Thus, they could be mailed to distant family and friends.

If you're looking to buy, sell or collect these postcards, it is of utmost importance, as all postcard dealers know, that one be able to identify the real real photo postcards from other published postcards and from re-issued reproductions. As the following postcard dealer, The 2Buds describe on their website: http://www.the2buds.com/rp.htm: The easiest way to tell if a postcard is a real photo or not is to look at it with a magnifying glass. Postcards that are NOT real photos are made up of many small dots. If you look at a real photo postcard, the image is solid (no dots). What distinguishes real real photo postcards from other kinds of published postcards, is that they were printed on real photography paper. Photographs which are printed on photography paper do not have a dot pattern when viewed under a magnifying glass. Thus, in true real photo postcards, one will not see a dot pattern– such as one finds in printed matter made by commercial means of reproduction. But the matter gets a bit complicated because some postcard companies took real photo postcards and made further reproductions of them where dot patterns do appear. These reproductions do not have nearly the value that many real photo postcards may have. As J.L Mashburn notes in The Postcard Price Guide (Colonial House, 2001, 4th Edition), collectors must be careful not to get stuck with reproductions.

The real photo postcard trend was not limited to family photos. In the early twentieth century free-lance postcard photographers roamed the world taking photos of all kinds of places and things and were paid by postcard publishers for their negatives. Some of these photographers had their own small postcard publishing businesses. These commercially-sold real photo postcards often have white hand-written captions identifying their subjects. The white writing is part of the photograph (the result of the photographer's using a black marking pencil on the negative, which gets reversed and becomes white in the positive print).

Though family portraits are probably the most common type of real photo postcard that one can still find in old personal photo collections, the most valuable real photo postcards contain images of unusual and uncommon glimpses into early twentieth century life: People engaged in occupational activities such as working on roads, in blacksmith shops, on ships, or in any walk of life. Other sought after subjects include people in uniform– particularly military; unusual images of animals; images of early farm equipment such as tractors; images of transportation including horses and buggies, early cars, boats, trains and airplanes; images of post-disaster damage including famous tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes; images of sports including teams, players and game being played.

In many, though not all cases, older real photo postcards are more pricey. If the card has been postmarked, stamped and written on, it is easy to determine its age. If it has not been posted, commercial real photo postcards can often be dated by identifying the symbols– the publisher's trademark, found in the stamp box area on the back of the card. There are guides to identifying these marks and thus the publishing dates. The best guide I have found is at Playle's Online Auctions: http://www.playle.com/realphoto/.

But, as with all collectible postcards, condition is of also supreme importance when determining price. The cards should be flat, without creases, significant stains or marks, and with square corners.

Perhaps the best resource for understanding the full scope, availability and current up-to-the-minute pricing for real photo postcards is to search and browse eBay. As with any collectible item, successful buying and selling is based on both knowledge and luck, and the competition for finding these postcards grows larger every day.

Sources:

The Postcard Price Guide (Colonial House, 2001, 4th Edition)

Playle's Online Auctions: http://www.playle.com/realphoto/.

from: Sabines Blog
Leighannes Weblog
Achaks Weblog

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Tell me a little about your background, your education and how you got into shooting professional photos?
I started out directing music videos, and then I took a photo that became really well known. I didn't know anything about photography at the time; I had just taken this one photo. I didn't even own a camera, my roommate was the photographer. Then all of a sudden, people started asking me to take their picture, and I said 'Ok.' I took a couple others and then celebrities started hitting me up, and I was like 'Alright.' These were actors that I didn't know or didn't know who they were and didn't realize it was a big deal, so I just started shooting people and it just started snowballing. I didn't have any training; I had just taught myself. And my shoots are definitely conducted in a very different way, I think that's what people enjoy so much, and that's why they continue to come back, and they tell their friends and it kinda becomes a story for them. Like, 'This is what I did, this is what I'm a part of, you should be a part too,' and it just snowballed like that.

What makes your shoots go differently? Tell me about a basic shoot for you.
Basically, 95% of my shoots happen at night. And generally someone will hit me up and say, 'Ok, I want to shoot.' Take Quinto, for instance. The first time I shot Zach, we had been friends, we'd hung out. He said to me 'lets shoot,' I was like 'Perfect, I'll pick you up at 10:30 at night,' so I went and picked him up and I had my crew with me and we broke into a bridge that was being built. We climbed around, we shot all through the bridge, and he was like 'Whoa, I've never done anything like this before.' So we shot there for a while, we jumped around; we hopped on some trains and rode around for a while. It was just interesting, it was very 'We're going to do this and then we're going to do this.' So we did that and then we came back to my house. On the way back, I had some people pick up some milk, and the milk shoot was born that way. And before, he didn't know anything; he didn't know what we were going to do at all. He just knew that we were going on an adventure and that's what it was going to be. And it all just ensued from my mind, and I just let it go. I try not to tell them anything beforehand, especially the first time I shoot someone, because I really like reaction, ya know? And after the first time I shot him he said to me, 'I've never done anything like this before, I can imagine you hear that every time.'

You mentioned earlier that you shoot a lot of your friends, are a lot of these personal projects or commissioned work?
Most of it is people come to me. You know I'm doing the book 'The Dirty Side of Glamour'? A lot of people say to me 'Oh, I'd love to be in the book,' then they come to me and what will happen is I have these shots that I'm going to use for the book and a lot of times magazines will purchase the other shots from me. So basically, I shoot whoever I want, however I want, and they have the option to buy or use some of the photos and the rest I use for the book.

So that sounds like a pretty ideal, photographic life. (Laughs)
(Laughs) Yeah, pretty much.

Do you do commissioned work though? Like shooting portraits specifically in your style for assignments?
Totally. I will do that, and sometimes magazines or whoever will hire me straight out to do something and I'll totally do that. A lot of the times though, it's literally referrals that get me work. And you know people that I've shot will introduce me to somebody who will want their photo taken, like Zach or Hayden. We were at his house hanging out and she was like, 'Oh, let's go back and shoot right now.' and that was around 1 o'clock in the morning. And it's really interesting because people want to be a part of it because it's different. And they were really excited to be involved with it. They enjoy the process of it.