Pleasant surprises
They say that photographers are seldom pleasantly surprised when looking through recently developed/downloaded photos. If you know what you’re doing, the idea goes, you know when you’ve gotten a great shot. You might be disappointed when you find out it’s not as great as you first thought (or it’s not as great as it looked on that tiny LCD on the back of your camera), but it seldom works the other way around.
The above photo is the closest I’ve come to an exception to this rule. I had the random idea, looking at my sideview mirror, that it would be cool if I could get the double yellow lines on the road and in the mirror to line up. I was stopped at a light and had a couple seconds, so I craned my camera out the window and tried to get the lines, well, in line. I failed miserably. Oh well.
Then when I looked at the shot after the fact, I realized that the discontinuous lines - including the reflected lines on the body of the car - made for a much more compelling composition anyway. Granted, the photo needed some post-processing (cropping, serious curves tweaking for contrast, and desaturating all the channels except the yellow) to make it what it is, but I’ve come to accept that as normal.
Oh, and the one circumstance that I feel “pleasant surprises” happen: catchflash in concerts. There’s just no predicting when you might catch someone else’s flash, giving you a perfect amount of clean white light to balance out the dim, colored washes. It’s only happened to me a couple times, but one of those times it produced a photo that I use on my business cards.