Photography Practice Quotes

In my mind's eye, I visualize how a particular... sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice.

You become technically proficient whether you want to or not, the more you take pictures.

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

You don't study photography. You do it.

The more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.

I know the importance of highly trained awareness of the “moment” and the immediate and intuitive response of the photographer. It should be obvious to all that photographers whose images possess character and quality have attained them only by continued practice and total dedication to the medium.

I’ve said about a million times that the best thing a young photographer can do is to stay close to home. Start with your friends and family, the people who will put up with you. Discover what it means to be close to your work, to be intimate with a subject. Measure the difference between that and working with someone you don't know as much about. Of course there are many good photographs that have nothing to do with staying close to home, and I guess what I'm really saying is that you should take pictures of something that has meaning for you

Take pictures all the time. Don't worry if you take a bad photograph; you learn more by taking a bad picture than a good one. If you don't like it, study it and figure out why you don't like it. You'll learn from your mistake.

The most exciting thing in England is a pigeon or foxes, which isn't very interesting to watch because everyone knows what they do. But I've taken pictures of them. Just for practice.

Creative writing and shooting are muscles that atrophy. But when you work them, you become a self-generator who can branch out.

I remember the first roll of film I took. It was wintertime, and I wanted to shoot a roll of film to practice processing it, so I took an entire 36-exposure roll of my dog, Tippy.

I've been doing photography in one form or another for, oh golly, over seventy years. I don't carry cameras. I used to. For many years I carried cameras wherever I went. Photograph whatever I saw that was of interest. In the last years, I've only used cameras to explore thematic ideas which presented themselves first. And then bring out the cameras to try to explore that idea.

Perhaps 'photography' has become so all-pervasive that it no longer makes sense to think about it as a discreet practice or field of inquiry. In other words, perhaps 'photography,' as a meaningful cultural trope, is over.