Ansel Adams 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.

Whatever it takes to get the image to reach that level is what that photographer needs to do.

With the camera, it's all or nothing. You either get what you're after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. I don't think the essence of photography has the hand in it so much. The essence is done very quietly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take, you have to do the editing.

If the guy behind the camera is not good, the pictures are bad. It's still you, and it's the same lines and everything, but it doesn't work.

I'm a very, very basic photographer. The main strength of my pictures, I guess, is the mood and feel I get out of the people that I meet. But technically I don't think I'm very advanced. That never interested me.

The difference between an amateur and a professional photographer is that the amateur thinks the camera does the work. And they treat the camera with a certain amount of reverence. It is all about the kind of lens you choose, the kind of film stock you use… exactly the sort of perfection of the camera. Whereas, the professional the real professional – treats the camera with unutterable disdain. They pick up the camera and sling it aside. Because they know it’s the eye and the brain that count, not the mechanism that gets between them and the subject that counts.

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.

To make what you have in your head, I think that's what directing is.

You don't take a picture, you make a picture.

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

People think that it is important to learn by assisting the great photographers. I say that is a big mistake. Be happy; just learn from any little guy. Learn how to use the camera - you don't need anything else. You can't be taught the real skill anyway.

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

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

I had the landscape in my arms as I painted it. I had the landscape in my mind and shoulder and wrist.

It's seldom you make a great picture. you have to milk the cow quite a lot to get plenty of milk to make a little cheese.

The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.

I just use [the camera]. I just pick it up like an axe when I've got to chop down a tree. I pick up a camera and go out and shoot the pictures I have to shoot.

Only a fraction of the camera's possibilities interests me - the marvelous mixture of emotion and geometry, together in a single instant.

The camera need not be a cold mechanical device. Like the pen, it is as good as the man who uses it. It can be the extension of mind and heart.

There's no particular class of photograph that I think is any better than any other class. I'm always and forever looking for the image that has spirit! I don't give a damn how it got made.

The key is to photograph your obsessions, whether that’s old people’s hands or skyscrapers. Think of a blank canvas, because that’s what you’ve got, and then think about what you want to see. Not anyone else.

I've always written songs with a visual counterpart in my mind that no one else can see.

I realize more and more what it takes to be a really good photographer. You go in over your head, not just up to your neck.

The camera was waiting for me by predestination and I took to it as a musician takes to the piano or a painter to canvas. I found that I was master of the elements, that I could work miracles.

Working with the kind of talent that I've gotten to work with, like the cast of Sin City, it makes me think probably more fully dimensionally about what is going on behind their eyes. But I draw the way I draw, and ain't nothing gonna change that. Although, I draw Marv and I think, "Boy, I could throw a little Mickey [Rourke] in there."