Ansel Adams
Black and white photography is truly quite a 'departure from reality', and the transition from one aspect of visual magic to another was not as complete as many imagine.Collection: Photography
The skies and land are so enormous, and the detail so precise and exquisite that wherever you are you are isolated in a glowing world between the macro and the micro.Collection: Glowing
Notebook. No photographer should be without one!Collection: Notebook
The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.Collection: Photography
I believe photography is a tool to express our positive assessment of the world. A tool to acquire ultimate happiness and belief.Collection: Photography
I know some photographs that are extraodrinary in their power and conviction, but it is difficult in photography to overcome the superficial power or subject; the concept and statement must be quite convincing in themselves to win over a dramatic and compelling subject situation.Collection: Photography
To the vast majority of people a photograph is an image of something within their direct experience: a more-or-less factual reality. It is difficult for them to realize that the photograph can be the source of experience, as well as the reflection of spiritual awareness of the world and of self.Collection: Photography
I usually have an immediate recognition of the potential image, and I have found that too much concern about matters such as conventional composition may take the edge off the first inclusive reaction.Collection: Firsts
Art is both the taking and giving of beauty; the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.Collection: Art
How high your awareness level is determines how much meaning you get from your world. Photography can teach you to improve your awareness level.Collection: Photography
I hope that my work will encourage self expression in others and stimulate the search for beauty and creative excitement in the great world around us.Collection: Photography
A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels...Collection: Photography
Ask yourself, 'Why am I seeing and feeling this? How am I growing? What am I learning?' Remember: Every coincidence is potentially meaningful.Collection: Meaningful
I never know in advance what I will photograph,...I Go Out into the World and Hope I Will come across something that Imperatively interests me. I Am Addicted to the Found object. I have No doubt that I Will Continue to make Photographs till my last Breath.Collection: Found Objects
The next time you pick up a camera think of it not as an inflexible and automated robot, but as a flexible instrument which you must understand to properly use. An electronic and optical miracle creates nothing on its own! Whatever beauty and excitement it can represent exist in your mind and spirit to begin with.Collection: Thinking
I can look at a fine art photograph and sometimes I can hear music.Collection: Art
I know that I am one with beauty and that my comrades are one. Let our souls be mountains, Let our spirits be stars, Let our hearts be worlds.Collection: Stars
I am sure the next step will be the electronic image, and I hope I shall live to see it. I trust that the creative eye will continue to function, whatever technological innovations may develop.Collection: Eye
If what I see in my mind excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph.Collection: Mind
There are no forms in nature. Nature is a vast, chaotic collection of shapes. You as an artist create configurations out of chaos. You make a formal statement where there was none to begin with. All art is a combination of an external event and an internal event… I make a photograph to give you the equivalent of what I felt. Equivalent is still the best word.Collection: Art
We either have wild places or we don't. We admit the spiritual-emotional validity of wild, beautiful places or we don't. We have a philosophy of simplicity of experience in these wild places or we don't. We admit an almost religious devotion to the clean exposition of the wild, natural earth or we don't.Collection: Beautiful
You don't make a photograph just with a cameraCollection: Photography
Wilderness is rapidly becoming one of those aspects of the American dream which is more of the past than of the present. Wilderness is not only a condition of nature, but a state of mind and mood and heart. It cannot be confined to the museum-case status—seen only as a passing diorama from superlative throughways.Collection: Dream
Today, we must realize that nature is revealed in the simplest meadow, wood lot, marsh, stream, or tidepool, as well as in the remote grandeur of our parks and wilderness areas.Collection: Nature
Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space. I know of no sculpture, painting or music that exceeds the compelling spiritual command of the soaring shape of granite cliff and dome, of patina of light on rock and forest, and of the thunder and whispering of the falling, flowing waters. At first the colossal aspect may dominate; then we perceive and respond to the delicate and persuasive complex of nature.Collection: Spiritual
It is all very beautiful and magical here - a quality which cannot be described. You have to live it and breathe it, let the sun bake into you.Collection: Beautiful
We all move on the fringes of eternity and are sometimes granted vistas through fabric of illusion. Many refuse to admit it: I feel a mystery exists. There are certain times, when, as on the whisper of the wind, there comes a clear and quiet realization that there is indeed a presence in the world, a nonhuman entity that is not necessarily inhuman.Collection: Moving
To visualize an image (in whole or in part) is to see clearly in the mind prior to exposure, a continuous projection from composing the image through the final print.Collection: Photography
A photograph is not an accident - is a concept. It exists at, or before, the moment of exposure of the negative.Collection: Photography
The artist and the photographer seek the mysteries and the adventure of experience in nature.Collection: Adventure
One of the most important pieces of equipment, for the photographer who really wants to improve, is a great big wastepaper basket.Collection: Important
It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium.Collection: Photography
The quality of place, the reaction to immediate contact with earth and growing things that have a fugal relationship with mountains and sky, is essential to the integrity of our existence on this planet.Collection: Integrity
The whole world is, to me, very much "alive" - all the little growing things, even the rocks. I can't look at a swell bit of grass and earth, for instance, without feeling the essential life - the things going on - within them. The same goes for a mountain, or a bit of the ocean, or a magnificent piece of old wood.Collection: Ocean
The craft of photography is the key to good images.Collection: Photography
No matter how sophisticated you may be, a large granite mountain cannot be denied - it speaks in silence to the very core of your being.Collection: Nature
I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.Collection: Art
The ‘machine-gun’ approach to photography – by which many negatives are made with the hope that one will be good – is fatal to serious results.Collection: Photography
The best picture is around the corner. Like prosperity.Collection: Prosperity
I’m interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.Collection: Built
A photograph is not an accident - it is a concept.Collection: Photography
I eagerly await new concepts and processes. I believe that the electronic image will be the next major advance. Such systems will have their own inherent and inescapable structural characteristics, and the artist and functional practitioner will again strive to comprehend and control them.Collection: Believe
To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces.Collection: Photographer
The piano has eighty-eight keys, and you have to be able to play all of them. And the range of white to black is analogous to the eighty-eight keys and you have to be able to play all eighty-eight keys in that palette from white to black.Collection: Keys
Photography is an investigation of both the outer and the inner worlds. The first experiences with the camera involve looking at the world beyond the lens, trusting the instrument will 'capture' something 'seen.' The terms shoot and take are not accidental; they represent an attitude of conquest and appropriation. Only when the photographer grows into perception and creative impulse does the term make define a condition of empathy between the external and the internal events.Collection: Photography
Photography and photographers have an inevitable development. They progress more or less by steps. Every five or ten years some new point of view is developed and young people are inclined to follow it.Collection: Photography
I can't verbalize the internal meaning of pictures whatsoever. Some of my friends can at very mystical levels, but I prefer to say that, if I feel something strongly, I would make a photograph, that would be the equivalent of what I saw and felt.Collection: Would Be