Victorian Photo Fakes

I feel as though I've been away from blogging a lot lately. It must be the summer weather! I'm out in the garden every weekend, and have been accomplishing a lot AWAY from the computer!

Something I did manage to do recently involves messing around with some old photos I'd taken in the past. I wanted to get them to appear to have been photographed in the Victorian era.

Do you think these look old? I'm a bit of a Photoshop geek, so I was able to tweak these to my liking. I took each photo, vignetted the edges, sepia toned them, blurred the focus in certain areas, and added some grungy scratches and edges.

The first and second photos above are my house. I always wondered what it looked like back in 1873, and now I kind of do! There's one of my chairs. And here's my cat, Penny! Or is it her ancester?

This is our town's historical society.

In order for these to appear even more like they could be from the Victorian era, I chose subject matter I knew the Victorians liked to photograph. I picked some photos that were actually old buildings, furniture, etc. To me, the photograph below looks like it could be the great Ferris Wheel from the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. But it's really the famous London Eye, built for the Millennium!

And here's a view of London from atop the Eye! Most of these buildings existed back then as well. See Big Ben?

One of the many old London pubs and restaurants also made a good subject for my deceit!

As did these street shots in Edinburgh!

This is outside the gates of Buckingham Palace. But it could very well have looked the same over 100 years ago, with the horses and carriage.

OK, these buildings are many centuries old! This shot could have been taken any time! This was taken in Rothenburg, Germany.

This is Eisenbach, the little town in Germany where my great-grandma was born. Except, what's that modern car doing there?

I hope you enjoyed my little exhibit of Fake Victorian Photography! It was a lot of fun to do, and you very well might see more like this in future posts!