"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."
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Quote collection
Ansel Adams quotes (page 5 of 8)
149 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I tried to keep both arts alive, but the camera won. I found that while the camera does not express the soul, perhaps a photograph can!"
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"I expect to retire to a fine-grained heaven where the temperatures are always consistent, where the images slide before one's eyes in a continual cascade of form and meaning."
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"A photograph is not an accident - is a concept. It exists at, or before, the moment of exposure of the negative."
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"Art is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit."
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"As the fisherman depends upon the rivers, lakes and seas and the farmer upon the land for his existence, so does mankind in general depend upon the beauty of the world about him for his spiritual and emotional existence."
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""Simply look with perceptive eyes at the world about you, and trust to your own reactions and convictions. Ask yourself: "Does this subject move me to feel, think and dream? Can I visualize a print - my own personal statement of what I feel and want to convey - from the subject before me?"""
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"It is my intention to present - through the medium of photography - intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators."
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"With all art expression, when something is seen, it is a vivid experience, sudden, compelling, and inevitable."
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"Photograph not only what you see but also what you feel."
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"The best picture is around the corner. Like prosperity."
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"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."
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"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."
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"If what I see in my mind excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph."
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"The dismal half-baked images of the average "reportage" and "documentary" photography are self dammning... the slick manner, the slightly obscure significance, the esoteric fear of simple beauty for its own sake - I am deeply concerned with these manifestations of decay. Gene Smith's work validates my most vigorous convictions that if the documentary photographs is to be truly effective it must contain elements of art, intensity, fine craft and spirituality. All these his work contains and we may turn to his work with gratitude, appreciation and great respect."
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"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."
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"The craft of photography is the key to good images."
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"The technique of 35mm photography appears simple. One is beguiled by the quick viewing and operation, and by the very questionable inclination to make many pictures with the hope that some will be good."
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"All art is the expression of one and the same thing- the relation of the spirit of man to the spirit of other men and to the world."
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"I have often had a retrospective vision where everything in my past life seems to fall with significance into logical sequence. Intuition, suspicion, or confidence in new ventures; there is a strange strain within me when advantage is not taken of some situation, the immediacy of recognition of the rightness or wrongness of a mood, a response, a decision - they are so often valid that I am increasingly convinced that we have yet to grasp the reality of existence."
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