The first photo you ever took...

[shelley_van_hoy]

<p>My first photo was taken with my first camera... a Polaroid Swinger. I got it on my 10th birthday and loved taking pictures with it on a trip to California (the first picture was my BFF Karla). You squeezed a red focus button on the top of the camera and rotated it until you got focus and click! You pulled out the photo from the back of the camera waited a few minutes and separated the photo from the backing. Then you uncorked a small tube of protective substance and swiped it across the picture. Huff and puff a few times and in a bit your picture was dry and ready for posterity. Ah the precursor to the DSLR age - instant pictures!<br>

YouTube has the old Swinger commercial with Ali McGraw.

Thank you Wikipedia for the Swinger camera image and YouTube link.</p><div></div>

[jamespfrank]

<p>This is my first that turned out. Took it in 2002 with my first camera Canon G3.<br>

Sorry for the double post!</p><div></div>

[larry h.]

<p>Sorry I'm late to this party, but here's my story. It wasn't my first photo ever, but it's how I got serious about photography.</p>

<p>As a kid, I collected coins. In 1973 at age 13, I won a competition for an under-18 scholarship to the American Numismatic Association's headquarters on the Colorado College campus (a place my daughter is now considering--OMG!) for a 1-week seminar, topic of my choice. I chose coin photography.</p>

<p>Well, I show up with my Kodak Instamatic. Everyone else showed up with either Nikon or Zeiss (model?) SLRs, complete with bellows and/or macro lenses, etc. Obviously, I was lost with all the equipment, terminology and other stuff. But I actually still remember many of the macro/object photography lessons I learned, including matching the color temp of the lights used to film type, using direct light vs. reflected or diffused light, and macro ratios.</p>

<p>After the seminar, my parents arranged for me to spend three days in Denver by myself! As a parent of 17 yo twins, I cringe at the thought of a 13 yo alone in a big city. I have since realized all the orchestrations my mother set up to 'watch over me from afar'. Also as a parent myself, I now thank (and thanked) them (they're both deceased) for this leap of faith. It was in my opinion the thing they did 'most' right in raising me.</p>

<p>Anyway, from the Denver hotel, I took Gray Line tours to Pike's Peak, Cripple Creek, Garden of the Gods, and other places I don't remember. So my pictures from those places are what I would consider my first photos. I probably have them somewhere in all the boxes of photos they left me.</p>

<p>Later that summer, my aunt bought me a Kodak Retina Reflex S (which I now realize was an amazing camera) with a 50mm/1.9 and a 135mm/4.0, both Schneider IIRC. I later jammed that camera with its leaf shutter (in a badly vulnerable position) by trying to use a toilet paper core as an extension tube to photograph coins, believe it or not. I kick myself now for that.</p>

<p>When I turned 14 a couple of months later, I started working (underage) at a local deli to feed my coin collecting habit. Instead, after saving about $250, I bought a Minolta SRT-102 with a 50mm/1.4 Rokkor-X lens, starting my photography habit. The rest is history (I stopped collecting coins a few years later).</p>

[amos_soma]

<p>I no longer have my first photo and don't remember what it was but it was black and white and taken with an Argus C3. Color print film was very expensive in those days and even Kodachrome was pretty pricey. </p>

[leicaglow]

<p>I'm really enjoying this thread. Mine was with a Kodak Instamatic with Fotomat film of the Space Needle. I think I learned early on to appreciate the square format. Age 7.</p><div></div>

[zpuskas]

I don't remember my first photo other than it was probably of my sisters. I rememeber getting a Kodak Starflex for my birthday (must be around 1958-9). It was loaded with 127 B&W film. This was my introduction to photography. It don't remember taking another roll of film until about 1967 when I was in the USAF and bought my first 35mm, a Canon QL19.

[museebfoto]

<p>Maybe this is from the first roll film I shoot in 1970, it is for the annual spring festival procession celebrated in Nineveh city - Iraq . The camera was ADOX Golf.<br>

I found the following site about the same camera that I had.<br>

<a href="http://www.thecamerasite.net/03_Folder_Cameras/Pages/adoxgolf.htm">http://www.thecamerasite.net/03_Folder_Cameras/Pages/adoxgolf.htm</a></p>

<div></div>

[bob_bill]

<p>Darn, hadnt thought of it in a while. First photo was a portrait of grandpa in his rose garden, 1957 with pump sprayer and fedora props. Think Godfather I just before his heart attack. Shot with a Brownie box camera. It had 2 controls, film advance and shutter if you didnt attach the flash and a bulb. More than that on one dial of my Nikon today. Printed horizontally with an enlarger constructed from wood, a light bulb, light switch and an old camera with the back removed. Did I say I had to walk a mile to school through the snow? Yes siree bob. </p>

[KenPapai]

<p>My first camera shot (120?) film with the square flashbulbs... around 1969. I wish I knew what it was or could dig up some photos from then. <br>

Nice stories here!</p>

[thebarnman]

<p>Hi Shelley, my first image was also from the Polaroid Swinger! It was probably around 1967 or 68. <br /><br />I don't have the image today, however I was sitting on the couch and took a picture of my dad standing in the living room.<br /><br />I remember him saying something to the effect of not to do that too many times as it was expensive.</p>

[skorpia_ghionoaia]

<p>1969 - I was 2 years old, in my first "conscious" contact with the snow, and I took a pic (with a Smena 8) of that white wonder... an all white photo, except my fathers (deformed and gray) hand. A disturbing photo, for me. A very dear one, now yellowish - as both of us became. I could write a novel about it. Not here, don't worry.<br>

Like all comments.</p>

[luis_g]

<p>It was 1953 or1954. My father was an architect, a handsome wiry man in a white suit, and on that day he asked if I wanted to come along to a job site. He was going to be taking pictures to document the progress of the building. I jumped at the chance. He had a 1953 Jaguar Saloon Mk VII at the time, a large stately thing with a velvet rope going across behind the front seat. I remember the light...it was a clear day, with a very few whipped-cream-topping clouds. He handed me one of his Leicas, a IIIf, with the exposure pre-set, and focus at hyperfocal distance. "Just point and shoot". I was beaming with pride that he let me use that camera. As he stood with his Rolleiflex making a few exposures, I followed, stood nearby, squinted through the finder and photographed a pyramidal-shaped white sand pile, maybe eight feet high next to the building. The camera's gone, as is the picture, and my father. Maybe the building still stands. The memory does.</p>

[jrickert]

<p><a href="../photo/14582992">http://www.photo.net/photo/14582992</a><br>

Here is a link to the first portrait I ever took. I was about 19 years old, and posed this brother and sister.</p><div></div>

[GBarrington]

<p>I can't remember. It seems there have always been cameras in my life even though my family was NOT the sort of people who took photos. Or people who cared about cameras. Maybe that is why I remember the cameras, they had no value to anyone else and I could have them all to myself.<br /><br /> I remember a green Bakelite box camera (620 film), brand unknown, with a film winding knob and a ruby red window in the back and an OVF on top. I remember it from about the age of 2 - 3 on. And I remember looking through the Viewfinder and clicking the button with no film in the camera. I also remember taking off the back and looking through the back of the lens and clicking the button.<br /> <br />At the age of 11, I remember bugging my mother for Seventy-five cents for some B&W Kodak film for that camera. I remember loading it, I remember winding the film, but for the life of me, I can't remember what I took pictures of, or even if I ever got the pictures developed!</p>