John Steinbeck Quotes

A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they'll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won't do a thing for you if you don't have anything in your head or in your heart.

On digital photography: It's fantastic, but it's not a freebie for anything. You still have to have this (he points to his eyes), and this (points to his heart), and feet.

We do not make photographs with our cameras. We make them with our minds, with our hearts, with our ideas.

Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.

A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.

Things develop in front of my camera, and then I will try to do the best out of it. I am close, but in most of the scenes, I am trying not to be seen. I think that's the trick. I think it starts in your heart, goes to the head, and the head puts it into the finger.

My pictures are my eyes. I photograph what I see - and what I want to see.

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.

Visual ideas combined with technology combined with personal interpretation equals photography. Each must hold it's own; if it doesn't, the thing collapses.

A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.

A photographer without a magazine behind him is like a farmer without fields.

Artists are the people that no matter what, pick up the pen, pick up a paintbrush. They take the time to translate what is happening to create something that resonates deeply with the rest of the people that are caught in the middle of their own reality.

To me, that is the essence of me as a photographer. It is those ideas, working with them, formulating them and eventually putting them down on paper, photographing them and then going on to the next step.

The camera is not the instrument. People are always the instrument.

Photography has always been a major part of my vision: my excuse for meddling with what the world looks like.

Literally, FX is like, 'How can we foster your vision?' My vision is pretty much taking pictures of the way I see my life.

It's actually one of the only things that I do that I don't get frustrated over. Everything else I do - racing, golf, video games - those things I want to win at. With photography, I think the camera wins every time.

I have more of a relationship with the subject than I do with my camera equipment. To me, camera equipment is like a tin of shoe polish and a brush - I use that as a tool, but my basic camera is my emotion and my eyes. It's not anything to do with the wonderful cameras I use.

There is a secret, I think. When you are front of a camera there is something that happens. Some relationship, some movement, some strange kind of suspension. That's where you find the layer in yourself that is duplicated in everyone. And when you get it right, if you can imagine all the hearts beating in one beat, it's like that. It's beautiful.

To take photographs is putting one's head, one's eye, and one's heart on the same axis

If youre not interested in life, then photography has no meaning

It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera... they are made with the eye, heart and head.

The camera's a ballpoint pen, an imbecile; it's not worth anything if you don't have anything to say.

The desire to discover, the desire to move, to capture the flavor, three concepts that describe the art of photography.

I'm going to put every aspect of myself out into the world and try to convey it through photography.