This is from my sister’s wedding - the photographer was a professional, but I don’t think this was posed - she was just sitting and waiting for something, and he snapped what I think was the best shot of the day.
Took this at a HS track meet. I am really bad at timing action shots but this one was near perfect.
Mine was pre-digital, so I don’t have a scan handy. I was taking a picture of a giraffe at the Milwaukee Zoo, and just as I snapped, the giraffe bent down to take a drink out of its pool, and I got a beautiful double image of the giraffe and its reflection, with its graceful neck bending down as its lips just touched the water.
I framed two 8x10s and gave one to a friend who collected giraffe stuff at the time. She loved it. My copy is still on display in our dining room.
See this picture. I was chasing the limo for the band Jethro Tull back in '77 (in college). I took a flash photo of the limo and it illuminated the inside. I was thrilled to find I had captured lead singer Ian Anderson at the window, looking surprised. I sent the picture to their website years ago, hence the link.
This image of the full moon at the tippy top of a tree. Looks like an ornamant.
This one is my favourite taken-by-accident currently on my Flickr page. I was fiddling with my camera settings while taking photos of Ariel the Wonder Cat and hit the button by accident, taking a pretty awesome photo in the process.
Great pictures! The cat and dog pictures are wonderful. Easily half the pictures I took last weekend are of the dogs we had with us. They’re always good for a smile when I go through my animal and pets album.
NinetyWt – I love the ones of the kids. The happiness on their faces is fantastic.
Sublight – In addition to the color, the symmetry in that shot is what caught my eye. I love architectural shots like that.
CAT=^…^= – Great cloud pictures! I took one out the window of our plane on the way to Alaska. Just puffy white dots in a beautiful blue sky.
I love that! Did you do that on purpose?
Because now I am thinking of giving it a try sometime.
Ya, I am not too proud to steal a good idea.
Nope, complete accident. I don’t think I could have gotten the moon that centered if I did it on purpose.
Calgary is an awesome place for cloudwatching - we get strange weather patterns from being on the dry side of the Rockies, and there’s always something going on in the sky.
I wish I could have captured this on film - a couple of days ago, the full moon was just rising all gibbous and glowing, with the sunset just pinking up nicely on the other side of the sky. It was glorious.
I have no idea what I did, but this Caribbean sunset makes me happy.
This picture of Chicago was taken pretty well by accident: I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time, including having a good window seat and my camera bag at my feet. This picture was taken just 2 minutes later, showing just how fast conditions were changing.
This isn’t anything but a teenager in a go-cart, but somehow the combination of the sun in her face, the wave and the ridiculous sunglasses made this photo something completely different. She really doesn’t look much like this, but here we have the Glam driver
This was taken by my then-3-year-old son. It’s just a picture of my legs, but I work on a magazine and it looks perfectly composed to be a two-page spread, with copy on the left, on the subject of summer, sandals, legs, grass … or something.
vetbridge and Giles,
Those are some really gorgeous photos. They are calendar worthy if you ask me.
I took this picture on purpose, carefully arranging the hooks, for a college photography class on 35mm B&W film. The “dumb luck” was I needed to print it out for an art show elsewhere, but it was a weekend and the door to the 35mm film scanners was locked.
I took a chance and scanned it with my regular bed scanner. The resulting rough-hewn look won me an honorable mention award and my only sold piece.
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My wife was busy taking a macro shot of a spider and I was kinda just standing around. Looking up, I saw this and “stole” the camera when she was done with the spider.
For a typography project in college I designed a piece using the famous anti-smoking quote from James I of England’s “A Counterblast to Tobacco”: “A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.” It was black on white, exposed onto some sort of print paper (I don’t recall the specs, sorry; it was a long time ago).
Anyway, I printed/exposed the thing toward the beginning of the semester, stuck it in a folder, and forgot about it until the end of the semester, when it was time to turn it in. Took it out of the folder, and . . . it had suffered some sort of bleed-through exposure through the folder, giving it a black, mottled look all over, and a total “lung cancer” effect.
When I turned it in, I told the instructor that the effect was accidental, but that I thought it actually added to the piece. He still gave me an A. 
Giles, that photo is absolutely breathtaking.
Another one of my favourite randoms - I was trying to snap a picture of the sidewalk in Barcelona (anyone who’s been there will immediately recognize these hexagon tiles by Gaudi… they’re unmistakeable). However, I happened to catch The Boy’s feet and our interlocked hands on the edge, which makes it rather special to me.
And one last one… I was trying to take photos of Broken Social Scene onstage at an outdoor concert when a fan in front of me threw his hands up, smack dab in the middle of my shot. Normally, that sort of thing totally ruins the shot… in this case, it IS the shot.
I haven’t had much time for photography lately and when I did, I tended to (over-)think composition and technique. Not enough randomness which is something I’ll try to change when I get back at it.
Anyway, here’s a favourite from my friend’s wedding a few years back. I was just taking a photo of the table settings when my friend’s niece came twirling into the frame.
I love happy accidents: Tiny Dancer
I am posting this only because when I saw the first link in the OP it was the first thing I thought of. I don’t think it’s technically great but it did jump out at me when I viewed it. it was of course mostly accidental (I intended to take a picture, but I ‘accidentally’ had the camera set all wrong. I wanted a clear picture to show what the inside of a tunnel near monaco looked like. This is what i got…)
A few years ago my BiL got married and my late husband did the photography. While he set up the formal poses, etc., I wandered around with the small camera taking snapshots as usual. I happened to see the bride’s niece looking at the water and snapped a shot. It was the bride’s favorite shot from the whole day, and we used up 12 rolls of film (36 exp.) and filled up an SD card on the digital camera, well over 500 shots total that day.
