Carl Van Vechten Quotes

DSLRs take beautiful pictures, but they are hard to focus.

There are things that happen so quickly. A better cameraman can capture them, but if the light is not bright and you hoist up your camera by the time you've dialed in your settings. There are eye blink moments where you're like "Aaahhhh, I wish," but those are too many to catalogue. Nothing really sticks out.

The smallest feline is a masterpiece.

I had been teaching myself photography.

Photography has always been a passion of mine, but I began to study light field photography when I was in the Ph.D. program at Stanford University.

I never really learned photography.

That's why I like fast film. It gives you more freedom to light more naturally.

Photography used to be not for the faint of heart. Its rigors would weed out the not-so-committed pretty quickly. You had to crank the f-stop ring yourself!

I've always been intimidated by the technicalities of taking photos, especially with a film camera - not just a point and shoot.

The really simple approach to photography is a great balance to making the films.

I don't really know how to work a camera.

I am a former economist. I never went to photography school to learn photography.

I used to hate doing color. I hated transparency film. The way I did color was by not wanting to know what kind of film was in my camera.

I support any procedure that allows photographers to express themselves, whether that involves color, black and white, platinum, palladium and digital technology.

In the early days of picture-taking, the exposure shutter had to stay open for a long time, so you had to stay really still.

You learn tricks to make action look more dynamic - having the fight come toward you or shooting on a longer lens to compress the speed.

The problem for me is that I've never actually studied photography, so it's quite a steep learning curve. Cameras these days do so much for you automatically but I still think there's a point where you should actually know the technical side.

I live in Hawaii part time and love shooting the ocean, both long exposures that capture the movement of water and with a fast shutter speed to freeze the power and force of a wave.

I would like to become a better photographer. I'm working on that.

I feel more like a creative artist using photography because there's - the digital work is so interesting now. It's come to that. I have had many different stages of photography - there are many different ways to take photos. But I feel now I'm in that stage of my life where I use the camera, you know, in that way.

Digital photography makes you a better photographer.

I've grown up around people who love photography, and I think from being photographed for so long, I always wanted to understand how it worked, and I've been fortunate enough to be photographed by some really wonderful photographers, and so I learnt a lot from them, and I always ask them questions.

I am a huge obsessor with photography.

It's usually so fraught when you're taking a picture. I work with an 8-by-10 view camera and there's a, you know, hood that I put over my head, and it's tricky and complicated.

Sometimes I have taken photographs and just felt so excited that I could barely hold the camera steady, and the photo was boring.