victorian

A police photo album from the Victorian era that features criminal mugshots will go to auction after it was saved from a dumpster.

A traveling photography studio that was pulled around the English seaside by horses from the 1860s onwards will go up for auction.

Gyms are commonplace in the 21st century as are the machines within them. But back in the 19th century when lifting weights didn't exist, it took a series of bizarre photographs to educate the world on a new way to improve fitness.

This 22-minute video offers a fascinating deep dive into the history of portrait photography manipulation, which dates all the way back to the Victorian era. It's an eye-opening look at the continuous relationship between societal beauty standards and reality.

I’m Nick Harris, a photo restorer and colourizer at Photo Restoration Services. I take immense pride in my work and the preservation of memories for future generations. I’d love to share a recent project of mine, of colorized Victorian prisoner mugshots.

In the 1850s, photography became much more affordable and accessible for consumers. This sparked a trend in the Victorian era of postmortem photography, where dead loves ones featured among the pages of family albums. Here's a 2-minute video by the HISTORY channel about this creepy fad.

This is a set of notes on composition, loosely based on ideas of composition from the Victorian era. There's quite a bit more, and yet quite a bit less, to the Victorian ideas.

"Photoshopped" photos may be everywhere these days, but retouching images to make them look nicer has been around since the early days of photography -- it was just done differently through the years as new techniques and technologies emerged.

British photographer Tony Richards owns a number of old plates that were likely made during the age of the albumen print in the mid-to-late 1800s. Close inspection of the plates reveals the retouching that was done to the portraits after they were created.

Funny faces and unusual antics in front of a camera might be more prevalent now than ever before, but if you think our Victorian ancestors didn’t have fun with film every once in a while, you might be pleasantly surprised to see this humorous collection of slides that prove you wrong.

It's not easy to remember life before Photoshop. When we do, we think of a world where picture were straightforward, always showing exactly what happened to be in front of the lens when the exposure was taken. But that's not entirely the case.

Trick photography has been around for centuries, and even though the folks in Victorian times weren't nearly as concerned with artificially slimming down, they did like to have some photographic fun once in a while. This set of headless photographs from the 19th century is a great example of the kind of 'fun' we're talking about.

Kevin Klein has a hobby of miniaturizing Victorian technology, and recently he made the world's smallest wet plate camera using 1/32-inch plywood and other wood materials. The camera is only a little bigger than a quarter, and shoots miniature 1/2-inch square plate images.