The Velox Girl Goes From Infrared to Daguerreotype

A photograph which I bought on eBay. It was not the best of compositions; something like a haystack in the background blended in with the girl's hair disconcertingly. With the aid of the simple editing tools in the Paintbrush application, I attempted to tidy it up.

The original photograph was printed on Kodak Velox paper, a very slow printing paper producing a blue-black image suitable for contact printing. As the original print measures 3.25 x 4.25 inches it is reasonable to suppose the negative came from 118 type roll film such as a Box Brownie might need, or a Kodak Model 3 or a Hawk-Eye. All this helps to date the photograph, but the best indicator is on the reverse which has a repeat motif of ‘Kodak/Velox/Paper' in three lines. That dates it to sometime in the 1950s or 1960s, unless the developer was using old stock. Kodak discontinued that paper in 1968.

Kodak advertised Velox as ‘the only photographic paper made exclusively for amateur negatives’. The imperfections on this particular print indicate it was not made by a laboratory striving to maintain a business reputation.

Later I rendered it infrared via a filter effect, and now I have added a Daguerreotype effect in the Picmonkey editor.

Collections of photographs which once meant something to somebody are a staple of house clearances. They are bought in auctions and sold online.