Galen Rowell Quotes

Catching the right fleeting moment, with the right focus, is a very difficult thing to do.

Sometimes, I am lucky because all factors are combined - composition, light, emotion - and sometimes not. Most of the time, I must be patient and wait.

I've decided that what interests me most is that you can only capture the light at a certain time. But after that, five minutes after that, then it's a different thing. So if you don't have the right aperture, you've missed it. Of course, you can correct it in the lab. But not really.

I love catching a snapshot of something that is just about to happen. Or maybe something that just happened, you know. But I like especially that just-before kind of feeling.

My photography is the result of being there at the right moment.

Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.

The lions taught me photography. They taught me patience and the sense of beauty, a beauty that penetrates you.

Nothing is easy in cricket. Maybe when you watch it on TV, it looks easy. But it is not. You have to use your brain and time the ball.

Football is like hunting. One second can change it all, but it's not just any second, it's a flash. The prey is there and suddenly then it's not. In an instant it's over - you won't have the chance again. You need to know which one precise second to train for, and to understand that moment.

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

There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

There are an awful lot of people in the world and it's going to be terribly hard to photograph all of them... It was my teacher Lisette Model who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general it will be.

Photography is like fencing. You must keep your distance, wait, and then thrust.

The photographer's art is a continuous discovery which requires patience and time.

You wait until life is in the frame, then you have the permission to click. I like the adventure of waiting until the whole frame is full.

It's in trying to direct the traffic between Artiface [sic] and Candor, without being run over, that I'm confronted with the questions about photography that matter most to me.

My picture, Fifth Avenue, Winter is the result of a three hours' stand during a fierce snow-storm on February 22nd 1893, awaiting the proper moment. My patience was duly rewarded. Of course, the result contained an element of chance, as I might have stood there for hours without succeeding in getting the desired pictures.

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.

When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.

It's pretty amazing to see a guy, while steering at the wheel, suddenly raise his little 300 dollar German camera with one hand and snap something that's on the move in front of him, and through an unwashed windshield at that. (On the road with Robert Frank, 1958)

With a camera, one has to love individual cases.

Very often people looking at my pictures say, 'You must have had to wait a long time to get that cloud just right (or that shadow, or the light).' As a matter of fact, I almost never wait, that is, unless I can see that the thing will be right in a few minutes. But if I must wait an hour for the shadow to move, or the light to change, or the cow to graze in the other direction, then I put up my camera and go on, knowing that I am likely to find three subjects just as good in the same hour.

What's the best type of light? Why that would be available light... and by available light I mean any damn light is available.

The most important thing... is not clicking the shutter... it is clicking with the subject.