Your first photograph

[BayG75]

Do you remember the first photograph you took? I guess I am thinking of one taken due to an interest in cameras and photography - i.e. not a snapshot taken at age eight when you bugged your parents to let you take a photo with their camera while on vacation, or something like that. But feel free to define "first photograph" however you would like.

My first photographs were taken with a Kodak Instamatic 110 camera in 1975, at age 12. We were about to drive to Washington, D.C. on a family trip that summer and I found the camera in a drawer and asked if I could take it with me. I was told I could, so while in D.C. I used up one or two rolls on the typical tourist shots - the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol, etc.

That sparked an interest in photography. Over the next few months I asked my dad a lot of questions and he showed me how to use his Retina rangefinder and Topcon SLR. That Christmas I was given a Ricoh G rangefinder, my first camera. The first photo I took with it - on Kodachrome (my dad always shot slides) - was of my little sister, taken on the day after Christmas.

I shot my first roll of b&w print film (Tri-X) in 1977. The first photo on the roll was of a possum hiding in a bush next to our house.

I no longer have either the Instamatic photos nor those Tri-X negatives - I am not sure what happened to them. I do have the slide from December 26, 1975, and generally consider that to be my "first photograph".

 

[MattKing]

A roll of 127 Kodacolour shot in the Kodak Starmite I received as a present from my parents on my 8th birthday. All shots taken around our home on the day I received the camera.
I may have taken a shot or two on my Dad's Bantam RF before that, but I can't remember.
I don't think I have anything any more from that experience (negatives, print, the camera or even my parents) other than memories and the beginning of a lifelong fascination with photography.

 

[Paul Howell]

Sometime around 1963, A Bell and Howell 127 fixed lens fixed focus twin lens reflex, the film was black and white, don't recall the brand, subject was my brother and his friends surfing. I don't recall who gave me the camera, later I got a Kodak TLR that used 620, a gear focus, dim viewfinder , the lens was rather sharp.

 

[Theo Sulphate]

Cannot remember the first photograph, but likely it was a photo of my neighborhood street in Venice, California, around 1962, shot on 127 film (B&W, natch) in a Brownie Bullet camera.

My real interest was cinematography. My first movie film, using double-8mm Kodachrome II, was shot in a Beverly Hills park off of Santa Monica Blvd. in 1964, where my cousins performed parodies of TV commercials. I still have those films and the K II is still good!

 

[Sirius Glass]

I cannot remember my first photograph. I can remember some early photographs.

 

[faberryman]

I remember my first photograph clearly. I took it on a high school canoe trip in the Everglades in 1973 with my father's old Exakta which he let me use. The stated purpose of the trip was to document any environmental damage we saw, but that was mostly an excuse to go canoeing. I was amazed that that first roll I processed actually came out. I'm still pretty excited when I hold a roll up after pulling it out of the soup. Unfortunately all my old negatives have gone missing, though I still have my slides dating to the 1980s.

 

[Andrew O'Neill]

Pinhole image on photo paper, using a poster tube as camera, in grade 10 art class, 1978. I never bothered with photography until 1991. I was more into drawing and printmaking.

 

[Chan Tran]

I do not remember but it was taken with a Petri 7s and Plus X.

 

[Patrick Robert James]

Before I was interested in photography I took a bunch of photos of a backpacking trip through Europe and some of those are decent. I didn't get a real camera, nor was I interested in photography, until I helped a Swedish friend of mine buy one himself after college. I ended up with one too, a Canon A2. I don't remember the first photo I took with it, although I have quite a few family photos from around that time. I do remember my first print in the darkroom though. I still have it somewhere I think. Horrible print. Truly bad. Lol.

 

[mrosenlof]

1968 or 69, with an Argus C3 "brick" on Plus-X. My cat Apollo looking very curious walking toward me on the driveway of our house in northern Virginia. He would have been at about the close focus limit of the lens when I shot. For a long time that photo was in an album I have from that time, but it's now missing, as is the neg. I have negatives back to 1982, but no earlier. slides back to Christmas 1973.

 

[Cholentpot]

The one that started me down the rabbit hole?

The first shot I took on film that I processed myself was of a man on a homemade motor bike at a gas station sometime in late December about 3 years ago. It was a Nikkormat with a 50 1.4 and a bottom plate that was taped on. It was a gift and a workhorse. I shot it on Tmax 100 with no clue about anything at all and developed in D-76. Used a closet to wind onto a reel. All scratched up and nasty but it worked.

 

[bvy]

I lost my father in 1980. I was seven years old. Friends of my grandmother, weepy Macedonian women, showered me with money. My father was her baby and I was his only child, so I was a little bit spoiled. I took the money and bought a Kodak instant camera called... Hmmm. The Handle? Tactile memory is amazing. I still remember the response of the big shutter release button. I wondered what it would look like if I fired the flash into the mirror...

 

[Michael Firstlight]

This thread brings back memories. This is a very poor commercial scan of a very old (Tri-X) negative (circa 1970) when I made my first 'intentional' image and entered it a big local competition at the armory in Morristown, NJ. I recall I was about 12 YO at the time. It didn't win any awards, but at 12 I was ecstatic that it got an 'honorable mention' for the 'radial' composition comment from the judge. All I remember is it was cool to lay flat on the ground and look up to see the telephone pole and its extrusions from an ant's perspective. I was so excited from just getting feedback from the judge that is spurred me on to continue shooting and developing for the next 47 years (and counting). A little D76 and Dektol plus one whiff of fixer, and I was hooked for life. I really ought to reprint it properly as the negative has the full tonal range and it still in pretty good shape.

Mike

 

[blockend]

At college in 1975 we learnt to shoot and develop film. I got the short straw with a Zenit E. Last year I put a book together of my early photographs and they stand up well, technically and aesthetically. A little Photoshop on the scratches. Most importantly they capture Britain 42 years ago, which no amount of money can buy now. My first roll was taken wandering a somewhat notorious district that was being demolished for redevelopment. The replacement also gained a reputation for crime and is itself being rebuilt, I hear.

It's strange to look at young faces that are old men and women now, and the wide open spaces that briefly existed.

 

[Ian Grant]

I still have a print from my first roll of film somewhere taken around 1963 with a Brownie 127 and Verichrome Pan, I know I made a mistake and bought I think Velox paper and struggling with very long enlargement times as it was a Chloride contact paper

Ian

 

[removed account4]

not sure which came first ... a portrait of my friend tim h's sister hanging upside down
on the swingset so her hair stood on-end probably around 1974 with a flashfun my mom gave me.
it was dark out and i used a mini flash bulb.
or maybe, a few months before -- same camera -- a tree that was struck by lightening
camp next to the cabin i had slept in at summer. ( i still have the fotomat prints )
first photo i took in photo class ( processed and printed myself ) was a few years later --
either a telephone-pole-top looking up against treetops and a grey wintery sky,
or the matrix of a shallow puddle of ice and the curb ( both with a k1000).
( still have the prints in a box )

 

[benjiboy]

I don't remember my first photograph, it was about 65 years ago.

 

[railwayman3]

Rather like Ian Grant above^^^, my first photo taken entirely by myself must have been in the early 1960's using a Kodak Brownie Cresta 120 (*) , in a kit with case, strap and film (Verichrome) received as a Birthday gift from my Mother. My Father was a quite active amateur photographer since the 1940's, so I was familiar with his developing and printing film and projecting slides, but the acquisition of the Cresta camera was what really stimulated my interest.
(*) I don't think that my Dad regarded 127 as being a "serious" size of film.

 

[R.Gould]

A roll of Kodak Verichrome pan 127 in a brownie starmite, I was around 9 and had been interested in photography for a while, and my Grandmaother thought it woud be a good birthday present, I was so proud of the contact prints I made fron the negatives

 

[narsuitus]

It was a spring day. I was five years old. My mother and father took me and my new baby brother who was born in March, to the neighborhood park for an outing. I was having a temper tantrum because my mother would not let me hold my new brother. To distract me, my father gave me his Kodak Bullet camera and asked me to take a family portrait. It was my first photo.

Not only do I remember my first photo but I still have it and I still have the camera.



Kodak Bullet by Narsuitus, on Flickr

 

[mdarnton]

I'm pretty sure it isn't this one, but it could be. My family was a camera-heavy family, so I got an early start.

 

[etn]

My first real photographs were in the early 80s - I was about 10 years old. My Dad had just "upgraded" to an OM-2 and let me use his unmetered Zeiss Icarex 35. This is how I learned to meter, with a handheld Gossen Lunasix. We only shot slide film. He still has the Icarex, but the prism mirrors lost their silvering (is that the correct word?) long ago. He also still has the OM-2. He told me recently that he sold his Foca rangefinder to finance the purchase of the Icarex long before I was born.

I don't remember my first pictures but thinking of all this now, I should raid my Dad's house to try and find them.

 

[Alan Gales]

My first photographs were of family taken as a kid with my Polaroid Square Shooter ll. My parents would give my sister and I a new pack of film every Christmas for family snapshots.

In 1982 I bought my first 35mm camera for a vacation trip. I was 20 years old. My first artistic (?) photos were of the ocean, shot in Panama City Beach Florida. Yeah, white sand beaches shot with color negative film for a newbie. Fortunately, the skies were overcast with a storm out over the ocean and I got proper exposure.

 

[Ko.Fe.]

Shkolnik was my first camera. I took my first photographs with it. Nothing come out...

 

[Frank53]

Me, taking my very first picture.

https://instagram.com/p/BOHOQB9A4n0/

Regards,
Frank