Photo Magic - 1909

Okay, I know I promised flood pictures next, but here's one from the album I'm presently scanning that I just gotta post now.

It's an intriguing photo. For the record, the scratchiness around the bottle, and the inverted upside-down text on the wall in the right background are in the photo itself. But it's the bottle itself I want to draw your attention to. You may have to enlarge to image to see this, but...

I thought the label on the bottle was kind of "crumpled". But when I magnified the image (to remove photo 'spots'), lo and behold, that isn't a label - it's a small image of a young man! The 'label' is his shirt, and his head goes up to the shoulder of the bottle.

So let's see now. Grandpa posed the (older) man looking contemplatively at a bottle on a table. Then he took a second image (of the same man in his younger days perhaps?) and somehow inserted it into the first image. And the only 'evidence' he left of this are those telltale scratches around the bottle.

Would someone kindly tell me how he pulled this off in 1909! Did he cut out a hole in the first negative and insert the small portrait from a second negative? How? And how did he get the "younger" image to be just the right size to "fit into" the bottle? Finally, how did he manage to print a positive image from that?

I think Grandpa was born 100 years too soon. If he was living in today's world, he'd be a wizard at Photoshop. I am in total awe of this photo.