Your first successful photo?

[wide2tele]

What is your first photo you deem to be successful and why?
The reason you consider it to be successful can be any reason at all.

Below is one I took not long after starting photography. A simple pattern and texture photo.

It was the first photo I ever submitted to a competition. It came runner up in a camera magazine competition. It's the first photo I ever had published and it was the first photo displayed to the general public in any way.

Here is the part that makes the story:

After this photo was published, I was quite excited about it and thought I may head back to where it was taken. When I took the published photo, it was after heavy rain and the river flow was intense. The river would not normally be as it was that day.
I thought I may take a photo or two with the river in a more normal state.

When I arrived on location, I looked at the river bank I took the photo from. There was another photographer in the exact location I wanted to be.

I decided I would let him finish up whatever he was doing and just wait it out till he left. I looked further along the bank and thought I may take a few pics from there while I wait.

To get to the location, I had to walk past the photographer. As I walked past and above him on the bank, I saw he had the camera magazine and my photo sitting right next to him. He was attempting to duplicate my photo!

It was quite a moment. I never spoke a word to him. I walked straight past.

[Dave Humphries]

Congrats Mark,

Interesting story too.

Dave

[stuck]

What is your first photo you deem to be successful and why?...

At 17:11:22 GMT on 2 August 1971 the Apollo 15 lunar module lifted off from the moon's surface. I was 13 years old and had just received my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic 233, it was loaded with Kodachrome film. The lift off of the lunar module was the first to be shown on TV. Our TV was a 405 line black and white set. Undaunted by the limitations of both camera and TV I pointed the camera at the screen and squeezed the shutter button and captured a shot of the lunar module a fraction of a second after it the top half had separated from the base.

This is a crop from a scan of the slide. You have to use a lot of imagination to make out the two halves of the lunar module.
001_14_4cic

[Astro]

Not quite sure if this 'qualifies', but I was 8 in 1959, and I found a box of 'Gaslight' paper in a drawer. I was curious and asked my dad what it was. His response, (he was a teacher), was to suggest I got a negative from his photo abum, place it on top of a sheet of the paper (held down by a plate of glass), leave it on the window sill in the sunlight and leave it a few hours and then go back and look .

This I duly did and was astonished to see a 'positive' image on the paper when I lifted the negative. I still remember thinking it was real magical! I quickly found out the image needed to be 'fixed' otherwise the paper turned totally black. My dad advanced me 3d (Three pence 'old'money) to go to a chemist and buy some hypo crystals to do this. I promptly exposed a second sheet and produced a 'permanent' print.
I have been taking photographs ever since, but that first image I printed before I had my own camera, was on the wall in my bedroom until I left home to start University 10 years later! (I studied Chemistry and Bio-Chenistry )

[Manfred M]

I'm not sure what a successful photo is. I have definitely never noticed anyone by a river trying to duplicate one of my shots out of a magazine.

I would have to say one of my first successful shots was taken when I was around 7 or 8 years old with a Kodak Hawkeye Flashfun camera (early 1960s). The horizon line was level and the image was relatively well composed and no noticeable motion blur...

[YossarianXXI]

Mine is probably buried in my mom's basement somewhere. I was 17 on a trip to France with my school and took a really terrific picture of the Chateau de Chambord in the Loire Valley. IT took me another 20+ years to pick up photography and really start learning about it, but that photo is always stuck in my mind of how a great picture can really "pop". IT's not digitized and I hope to find it some day.

[escape]

My first successful image was taken two years ago when I took up photography. I took a photo of something I saw that I would not have photographed or even noticed before.

[tclune]

I don't tend to view my photos as successful or unsuccessful as such. Rather, I find myself bothered by particular shortcomings in my approach and feel the need to work on improving that. What I focus on varies over time, and sometimes I find myself satisfied that I have made gains on some aspect of the craft. For example, I have been shooting birds for the last few years and find myself unhappy with my tendency to either have a bird sitting on a branch or flying through an open sky -- my shots are just plain boring. I have also been interested in developing a better set of skills in post processing for drawing the viewer's attention to the places that I want them to see. Last week, I was at a mostly uneventful birding festival in Bar Harbor, Maine and was able to create a photo that felt like progress to me. I don't know how I'll feel about it in a month or a year, but it is satisfying to me today:

Recent photo example

(Sorry, my attempts to upload the image failed. The link will take you there if you wish.)

[AlwaysOnAuto]

I would have to say my first successful photo was one I took of my son when he was about 2-1/2 or 3 years old. We were visiting my mom and I snapped a picture of him out on her patio. I'd just bought a Minolta SR-T 101, used, for $30 off a fellow at work who'd moved on to a better/newer camera. I had explained to mom that the camera probably needed a CLA, which I was saving up for. When she saw the picture a few weeks later, she asked which camera I'd used as I had a fairly new Nikon FE as well as the Minolta. I told her the SR-T was what I'd used. At that point she said if I could take pictures like that with that camera, she'd gladly pay for the CLA. She really liked the picture as I some how had taken a great portrait of him. I sent the camera off to Minolta for a going over and still have it to this day. I use the 58mm lens on my Sony's. I probably have the picture some where, but finding it would be another story. I like to think that photo had a lot to do with me ending up with my grandmother's M3 rather than it going to one of my siblings.

[DanK]

What's successful? Successfully giving me pleasure? Other people enjoying it? Other people hanging it on their walls? Winning or placing in a local competition? Getting an image into a juried exhibit? Getting prints into galleries?

What I've found is that on several of these dimensions, my standards for what's a success keep going up. Some images that I considered very successful a dozen years ago I consider quite mediocre now. I'm not sure that's entirely a good thing...

[xpatUSA]

What is your first photo you deem to be successful and why?

In 1958, I was an Aircraft Apprentice at R.A.F. Halton in England. I had borrowed a camera and was wandering around the outside of our three-storey barrack block and noticed the black-painted sewage pipes running vertically up the back wall. Took a shot looking straight up with no knowledge of photography whatsoever. It turned out OK and the camera owner liked it, too.