Photography is kind of like golf for those of us that fall in love with it. Sometimes, at the exact moment the shutter clicks, you know you’ve made a photograph you can be proud of.

Maybe not the photographic equivalent of a hole-in-one, but the equivalent of an amazing straight drive down the fairway landing on the green inches from the cup. After years of patience and practise, with camera or club, these moments come more regularly. Sometimes you get on a streak where it almost comes easy, only to be followed by a period of missed shots and frustrating shanks.

It’s obvious when a golf shot misses the mark, but photography is more subjective. Photographers’ goals vary and viewers often don’t know why they like or dislike a photo. In the digital age, bad photos are quickly deleted, never to be reevaluated in a different time or context.

The Christmas tree photo you’re looking at here is technically a “bad” photo and might have been deleted if not shot on film. It’s not particularly sharp or steady. The photographer possibly missed focusing the camera and failed to hold the camera steady when they pressed the shutter release — a tripod is never a bad idea when photographing a Christmas tree! The composition is haphazard as the Christmas tree seems askew, another problem a tripod would have solved.

The photographer used a flashbulb, artificially illuminating the tree with harsh light and shadows. Again, if the photographer had used a tripod, they could have skipped the flash and even turned a lamp on, using a longer exposure to capture the tree’s Christmas lights with the lamp adding warmth to the colour balance of the room.

Although there are technical reasons why this might be seen as a bad photo and possibly discarded, thankfully it was kept and to me it’s a treasure. This “bad” photo was taken with a Kodak Instamatic camera in my family’s living room just before Christmas in 1973, and it happens to be the first photograph I ever took. I was 4 years old and had often played with a toy camera, but this was the first time I held a real camera and made a real photograph.

I’m not sure why my mother kept it, possibly because it might have been the only photo of our Christmas tree that year, possibly because folks kept more things back then, so it was thrown into the photo album with all our other photos. Most likely it was kept because like many parents, mom was watching for all her children’s little “firsts” that quickly come and go if you’re not paying attention.

Now decades later, this bad photo from Christmas 1973 has been elevated to a “hole in one” in 2025. Thanks, mom!