If you're tired of the unrealistic beauty standards set by all the edited pictures on Instagram and long for a return to "the good old days," here is some bad news: people have been "Photoshopping" portraits for just about as long as photography has been around.
For the past several years, German freelance photographer Nikita Roytman has been working on a personal photo project in which he does landscape astrophotography in the style and mood of the 19th-century Pictorialism movement. The series is titled "Nocturnal Mood Of Time."
A new exhibition in Los Angeles will feature crime scene photos captured by police officers in the Los Angeles Police Department from between 1925 and the 1970s.
Before the self timer and remote shutter release appeared in the world of cameras, photographers had a much trickier time getting themselves into group photos if they didn't have an assistant to help expose the shot. But a vintage photo has surfaced showing one photographer's clever solution to this problem.
Talented photographer and retoucher Karen Alsop recently decided to have some Photoshop fun with her friends and family. When her mom unearthed an old family photo from the 1900s, she added her kids into the shot and pretended it was an authentic photo of long lost relatives... and it worked!
Over in Peoria, Illinois, a box of nearly 200 glass negatives from the late 1800s and early 1900s has been found in the corner of the attic in a condemned house.
Want to see what photo studios were like a century ago? Turkish artist Ali Alamedy recently spent 9 months building a 1900s photo studio... as a miniature tabletop diorama.
Ellis Island in Upper New York Bay was the busiest immigrant inspection station in the United States at the dawn of the 20th century, with millions of immigrants arrived in the United States via the island by boat.
Amateur photographer Augustus Sherman was the Ellis Island Chief Registry Clerk for a number of years in the early 1900s, and he used his special access to shoot portraits of many of the immigrants who passed through the station.
Want to see an early example of beauty retouching in photography? Here's one. The side-by-side images above from the early 1930s show what a glamour portrait looked like before and after manual 'Photoshopping.'
George Lawrence was a commercial photographer with a knack for engineering and business. Born in Illinois in February of 1868, his career reached its zenith in the early 1900s when he took to the skies, creating incredible aerial panoramas using an invention of his called the 'Captive Airship.'
Last month, the Library of Congress finally finished a project they started all the way back in 2008: they finished digitizing an archive of 467 panoramic postcards from the early 1900's. All of these postcards are now available online for interested folks to peruse through, learn from and enjoy.
When you think about photographs from the early 1900s, you probably think about boring monochrome photos of locations or portraits of people with humorless expressions and rigid poses. Photographs costed more in terms of time, effort, and money back then, so photographers didn't waste them on silly photos, right? Wrong.
This series of photographs was created around 1905 by an unknown artist. Titled Bulldogs in Fancy Dress, it's being preserved for eternal chuckles in the Library of Congress' photo archives.
Albert Kahn was a wealthy French banker who launched a project in the early 1909 that aimed to create a photographic record of the world. The first commercially successful color photography process, Autochrome Lumière, had just arrived two years earlier, and Kahn decided to use the medium to both document human life and to promote peace. He sent out an army of photographers to 50 different countries, amassing 72,000 photos and 100 hours (183,000 meters) of film that became one of the most important collections of images in human history.