My very first issue of postcard featuring my own photograph has finally been printed and delivered to me!

The front

The back

Download the original photograph in HEIF (original format), JPEG, or WebP.

The Photograph

The photograph captures a pair of shoes being hung on an overhead power line, with a blue sky and scattered clouds as the background. A corner of a house is also in the picture.

Apple iPhone 12 mini was used to take this photo. ISO 32, aperture size f1.6, shutter speed 1/1553s.

When I took this photo, I had no idea what does this mean. I thought that it might be some sort of subculture that I didn’t know about. Until the moment when I selected this photograph to print on postcards did I go online and searched for the meaning of shoe tossing. Multiple different meanings exist – drug sale, celebration, … However, they share a common trait: signifying the current place. Something could happen, or could have happened around the place where someone threw a pair of shoes onto the power line. Like a visual beacon, or a map pin in real life. Thus, I named this photograph “Here” – it’s this very location that matters.

Nevertheless, I do not save GPS location in my photographs, so I have no idea where exactly this place is. All I know is that this photograph was captured on our way home after collecting some second-hand goods with H.

Overhead power lines (of course some of them may be communication cables) in the United Kingdom doesn’t look organised at all. Houses around a wire pole are simply connected to it on their shortest paths, so most often streets in the UK have radial overhead cables all around. The wire poles are often wooden; we don’t even know how long they’ve been standing at there.

The Postcard

The postcard has a (maybe) standard size of A6. The front contains only the photograph (“Here”), but cropped and placed in a portrait position. The back is prepared for writing, but also contains elements that will be on every postcard: a block of return address (which is my postal address), the title of the photograph, “Shot in Southampton, UK”, and a Web link (which redirects you to here if you visit, as I cannot put that much information on a tiny piece of card). In the middle of the back is a dotted line separating the message region and the postage & addressing region. The bottom of the back has 18 mm of space reserved for a postal barcode.

The return address unfortunately doesn’t feature the country name, so I doubt whether it would still be returned when it has travelled out of the UK.

The design was done with LibreOffice Draw. A template provided by the printing company was used to ensure quality print, for example, without white border (“bleeding”).

The photograph was conditioned before printing (the one provided for download above has not been edited). The iOS Photos filter “Vivid Warm” was used. However, while it looks great on screens, when printed in CMYK the colour somehow becomes slightly strange (but I cannot describe).

50 such postcard were printed with Solopress Eco-Friendly Postcards, which are said to be “100% recycled and carbon neutral”. I hope that these postcards don’t negatively impact the environment.

Final Words

If you land on this blog post by visiting the link on my postcard – thank you for reading! I’m very happy to know about a friend like you :)

If you want a postcard, drop me a message via email. I could write to you (with this specific postcard as long as I still have some)!