[Pseudoscience-is-malarkey (OP)]

This photo was taken in 1902. My great-grandfather is the boy standing between his mother and father. But it is his oldest brother on the top left that puzzles me. His right hand looks enlarged and disfigured. Is the size and color simply an illusion caused by bad lighting?

[Bored chemist]

It's in shadow, so it's dark.
And it's pretty much the same size as the other bloke's hand

hands.jpg (48.66 kB . 373x600 - viewed 1723 times)

[Colin2B]

The hand is certainly in shadow, but it may also be an effect of the colourizing. In 1902 colour was rare in family photos and so even well into the 50s they were shot in b&w and hand coloured. I still have a set my father used to use.

[RD]

The hand looks normal to me.

Back then longer-exposures were required, so motion-blur could create distortion.


blurry hand (hidden mother).png (315.15 kB . 380x555 - viewed 2235 times)

Also the photographic emulsion was overly blue sensitive:
so red-skin (e.g. lips) was rendered overly dark, (& blue-eyes overly pale).

[evan_au]

Color photography was still quite primitive in the early 1900s.
- The exposure was very non-linear, so objects in shadow could come out a very different colour than something which was properly lit.
- Even until the 1950s, unless you were very rich, you took black and white photos, and someone added colour later, with pencils or crayons.
- This is hard to imagine today, when everyone has a high-resolution colour camera in their smartphone!

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_photography