Robert Richardson Quotes

It's good that everyone has an opportunity to take pictures, the chance to be a photographer. Some are good, too. But the bad thing is that it's very, very difficult to take a great picture. Everyone can take a good picture - even a child - but it's hard to make a great one.

You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.

A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image.

I have a great little camera, and I had a theory that if the story is interesting, it doesn't matter what medium you shoot it on. You just have to make a good film.

I fight to take a good photograph every single time.

With photography, I always think that it's not good enough.

My idea of a good picture is one that's in focus and of a famous person.

People confuse 'pretty' with good cinematography.

It's just about going out and getting the shot, so I have a great understanding of how to execute it, so that really helps me, and also having a good understanding of all the action that I'm shooting, it helps me in determining how I'm going to capture it.

It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.

The great thing about having spent all this time on film sets is that I've been able to watch directors and how they work. I now know that this is what I want to do as well: to tell stories visually. But it's definitely my vision that I want to put across, nobody else's.

Of course I realize that photography is not the technical facility as much as it is the eye, and this decision that one makes for the moment at which you are going to snap, you know.

I know that if I were to take ugly photographs, no one would be interested in looking at them.

I definitely take a lot of bad pictures!

I suppose that I was a kind of consultant for taste. Is it good taste? Or bad taste? I had an attention to detail, to what would tell best the story. Because many people get excited about the work and drift off from the story.

I'm always secretly the most pleased when a show just really, really looks good and when my camera guys are really happy with the images they got.

I always say I make pictures rather than take pictures.

Many photographers feel their client is the subject. My client is a woman in Kansas who reads Vogue. I'm trying to intrigue, stimulate, feed her. My responsibility is to the reader. The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader.

I'm much more about the emotion that a photograph provokes out of you and less about how technically brilliant it is.

A lot of really good directors have a killer in them, as if they'd do anything to get that image. But that comes with the terrain and I don't mind it.

I was never attracted to being a very proficient singer or player. I suppose I was interested in creating a vision; in the same way I was very drawn to tension within cinema.

You ought to have a perspective when you're making a film.

So to me it's very similar in terms of trying to distill within the image, those elements that are gonna form, hopefully, a compelling visual statement.

A good picture book should have events that are visually arresting - the pictures should call attention to what is happening in the story.

When you're used to looking through a stills lens and you have to capture an emotional moment, and that picture is not moving and yet it has to have impact, I think that's the first influence on my style.