Introduction

Chelleline Voyages is a name of the postcards lines published as a part of my wife's Chelleline Cards. We have created postcards of New York, Montreal and North Carolina.

Let me introduce myself,
my name is Dmitry Gimon, and I was born in Russia (USSR at that time) and I moved to Canada when I was 30 and two years later I moved to the USA. I became interested in photography when I was a kid watching my father processing films and printing pictures in our apartment in Moscow. I think I was more astonished by the chemistry of the process, the smell and the atmosphere than by the idea of photography itself. That made me really like old photo equipment and old cameras (however, most of the pictures for the postcards were taken with new cameras).

Later when I got my first film camera, I spent years taking "selfies" (there was no such word at that time, because that was what most people with personal cameras called photography that time). As opposed to those kinds of pictures, while traveling I took some pictures of the places without myself in them. I was even teased a few times that those pictures did not make any sense, they are nothing more than postcards. Now I would take it as a compliment...

What is different in Chelleline Voyages, is that I am neither a photographer nor an experienced resident of a place we make postcards for. It has pros and cons. A good think is that being new to the place you are more like a tourist who takes pictures of things that I notice. However, as a tourist you can not really know everything about the place, but I am trying to do my best to learn and but still keep wondering of things around. I hope this blog will help me to do that and to share this discoveries with you.

It does not matter whether it is just a nice view or some unusual interpretation, making other people see what you see is what excites me the most about photography now. Once I got a digital camera I started publishing pictures online in my blog in Russian. When I was visiting New York my wife (my girlfriend at that time) encouraged to turn my pictures of the city into a set of postcards.

I will try to talk about every postcard in this blog, but I suggest to with North Carolina postcards since it is what is going on now. My wife and I moved to North Carolina last year and we currently live in Cary. It took about half of the year before we printed the first North Carolina postcards. Those are four postcards from Durham and one from Greensboro.

Let me start with one in Greensboro, you can see it below.

Yum-Yum Better Ice-Cream place.

This card is an example of my favorite situation when you take a picture without really thinking that it may be a postcard. Even more, I just liked the sign and the colors. Then later when I showed it to my wife and to the owner of the Bull City Crafts store they both wanted to see it as a postcard because of the legendary Cheerwine on it. Yum-Yum is also a very well known place in Greensboro.

If you are from North Carolina, please skip the text to the label X.
Cheerwine is a North Carolina soda with a cherry flavor kind of like Dr. Pepper. 

X.
Cheerwine was found in 1917 in Salisbury, NC (which is a year of communist revolution in Russia, although I don't think that those two events were related).  Here is an ad from 1935 [1].

What is interesting that even Cheerwine is 97 years old, Yum-Yum Ice-Cream shop is actually older [2]. It is 108 years old. They moved to the current location at University of North Carolina at Greensboro campus 40 years ago. 

Even Cheerwine is going national these days, I hope to contribute a little to the promotion of these local brand (Salisbury is less than an hour drive from Greensboro) as well as bringing some people to Yum-Yum when visiting Greensboro.