Composition Techniques Quotes

I started out being quite an eclectic composer, not quite sure where to fit in. I tried my hand a bit at everything, except perhaps music with lyrics.

...to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must break them.

There is no such thing as a natural sentence but there is such a thing as a natural paragraph and it must be found.

The sense of motion in painting and sculpture has long been considered as one of the primary elements of the composition.

A person cannot learn to be a photographer. He can only cultivate what he already has. I try to make people aware that they have something very precious to cultivate.

Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure. If man wishes to express himself photographically, he must understand, surely to a certain extent, his relationship to life.

I assure you that there's a lot involved in compositions with figures. ... It's like weaving... you must control and keep an eye on several things at once.

I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn.

A camera alone does not make a picture. To make a picture you need a camera, a photographer and above all a subject. It is the subject that determines the interest of the photograph.

My theory of composition? Simple: do not release the shutter until everything in the viewfinder feels just right.

Degas is a master of creating compositions that don't look composed.

I've always regretted the fact that I've never formally studied and learned the mechanics of writing music.

I compose the frame literally with the camera. Unless it makes a story point.

The art is the challenge which you must meet every day: the technique you should learn to control with time. The science and the art of photography are really one, and not opposed to each other.

Someone said to me, early on in film school... if you can photograph the human face you can photograph anything, because that is the most difficult and most interesting thing to photograph.

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

I don't shoot kittens with balls of wool. I don't shoot sunsets. What draws me? Ironic, surreal, unexplained, timely moments.

Image quality is not the product of a machine, but of the person who directs the machine, and there are no limits to imagination and expression.

There are two kinds of photographers: those who compose pictures and those who take them. The former work in studios. For the latter, the studio is the world... For them, the ordinary doesn't exist: every thing in life is a source of nourishment.

You don't make a photograph just with a camera

Photography's like this baby that needs to be fed all the time. It's always hungry.

Photographers feel guilty that all they do for a living is press a button.

Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality. It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term-selectivity.

The neatest part of this book I'm working on - to me - are the pictures that show the process... Because photographers... think things through and... it isn't luck, and it isn't random and it isn't accidental. It isn't.