Despite taking hundreds and hundreds of photographs of cars, some of which I'm very proud of, it turns out that the very first photograph I've licensed for commercial use is of a downtown building.
This building, in fact:
Dominion Securities Building, with blurry person.
That photo will appear, in due course, in a fine publication about Canadian Business and the Law - at least, I presume it will, since today they sent me the cheque. Quite by coincidence, as yesterday I emailed the person who solicited it in the first place, finding that her website and email address have since disappeared off the face of the internet.
Now, that's not the first photo I've licensed - in a sense, I've granted various people "licenses" of one sort or another to use my photos in various places, such as NowPublic, Schmap, or in school or university projects. And the first written license was between myself and a company that employs a fairly regular reader of this blog, to use a couple of photos on some promotional literature. Those, I exchanged for a very spiffy iPod.
Some artistic DNA sequences.
Some DNA sequencers, last year.
But today's cheque - well, that seems like some kind of milestone. A sale! A palpable sale!
Now, I just need to shove the guilt aside, and put the fee towards the "get Richard a new DSLR camera" fund, instead of doing something useful with it, like buying retirement savings, or putting it in the kids' education fund, or something.
Sigh.
