"One of the biggest mistakes a photographer can make is to look at the real world and cling to the vain hope that next time his film will somehow bear a closer resemblance to it...If we limit our vision to the real world, we will forever be fighting on the minus side of things, working only to make our photographs equal to what we see out there, but no better."
Galen Rowell; "Mountain Light : In Search of the Dynamic Landscape"

"The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding."
Edward Steichen

"Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask "how," while others of a more curious nature will ask "why." Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information."
Man Ray

"Decide what you want, decide what you are willing to exchange for it. Establish your priorities and go to work."
H. L. Hunt

"If you're photographing in color you show the color of their clothes - if you use black and white, you will show the color of their soul."
Unknown

"It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment."
Ansel Adams

"A good photograph is knowing where to stand."
Ansel Adams

"Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter."
Ansel Adams

"Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships."
Ansel Adams

"The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways. "
Ansel Adams

"In my mind's eye, I visualize how a particular . . . sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice."
Ansel Adams

"There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept. Ansel Adams

"A good snapshot stops a moment from running away."
Eudora Welty

"All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth."
Richard Avedon

"Buying a Nikon doesn't make you a photographer. It makes you a Nikon owner."
Unknown

"It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary."
David Bailey

"The magic of photography is metaphysical. What you see in the photograph isn't what you saw at the time. The real skill of photography is organised visual lying."
Terence Donovan

"The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking."
Brooks Anderson

"What moves me about...what's called technique...is that it comes from some mysterious deep place. I mean it can have something to do with the paper and the developer and all that stuff, but it comes mostly from some very deep choices somebody has made that take a long time and keep haunting them."
Diane Arbus

"I never have taken a picture I've intended. They're always better or worse."
Diane Arbus

"The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box."
Henri Cartier-Bresson

"One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind."
Dorothea Lange

"While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see."
Dorothea Lange

"I knew, of course, that trees and plants had roots, stems, bark, branches and foliage that reached up toward the light. But I was coming to realize that the real magician was light itself."
Edward Steichen

"You know... that a blank wall is an apalling thing to look at. The wall of a museum - a canvas - a piece of film - or a guy sitting in front of a typewriter. Then, you start out to do something - that vague thing called creation. The beginning strikes awe within you."
Edward Steichen

"Consulting the rules of composition before taking a photograph, is like consulting the laws of gravity before going for a walk."
Edward Weston

"I do not object to retouching, dodging, or accentuation as long as they do not interfere with the natural qualities of photographic technique."
Alfred Stieglitz

"I almost never set out to photograph a landscape, nor do I think of my camera as a means of recording a mountain or an animal unless I absolutely need a 'record shot'. My first thought is always of light."
Galen Rowell