Photography Cameras Quotes & Sayings

The act of photography is like going on a hunt in which photographer and camera merge into one indivisible function. This is a hunt for new states of things, situations never seen before, for the improbable, for information. — Vilem Flusser

Life as it unfolds in front of the camera is full of so much complexity, wonder and surprise that I find it unnecessary to create new realities. There is more pleasure, for me, in things as-they-are. — David Hurn

We don't take pictures with cameras, we take them with our hearts and minds. — Arnold Newman

I usually befriend the camera department very early on in the film and drive them nuts. I'm constantly bombarding them with questions and going through the stills photography. A film set is a great place for me and I love it. — Eric Bana

The camera basically is a license to explore. — Jerry N. Uelsmann

I thought using three cameras was a lot better than one, because you could see where you were going, where you'd been, and all kinds of things - more like life. I think photography has colored our vision. We're now in an area where it might break something. I think this is a time. I feel it. I don't know whether I'll be here long enough to experience it. I've no plans to leave yet. — David Hockney

Photography is a very subtle thing. You must let the camera take you by the hand, as it were, and lead you into your subject. — Margaret Bourke-White

Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. — Susan Sontag

I am always surprised when I see several cameras, a gaggle on lenses, filters, meters, et cetera, rattling around in a soft bag with a complement of refuse and dust. Sometimes the professional is the worst offender! — Ansel Adams

Photography through the camera is an instrument of detection. We photograph not only what we know, but also what we don't know. — Lisette Model

People, there's no such thing as, THE BEST CAMERA BRAND, but yes there will always be THE BEST CAMERA AT ANY GIVEN TIME. Technology will change, but not art. — Ashraf Saharudin

There is a camera is between a man and a woman. — Nobuyoshi Araki

I have a master's degree in photography as a fine art, and I would call my work primarily conceptual. I don't carry cameras with me wherever I go. I get an idea of a subject matter I want to deal with and I pull out my cameras. — Leonard Nimoy

The camera can photograph thought. It's better than a paragraph of sweet polemic. — Dirk Bogarde

Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good. — Wallace Stevens

"Utter truth is essential, and that is what stirs me when I look through the camera." — Margaret Bourke-White

When gifts are given to me through my camera, I accept them graciously. — Minor White

It's possible to think of photography as an act of editing, a matter of where you put your rectangle pull it out or take it away. Sometimes people ask me about films, cameras and development times in order to find out how to do landscape photography. The first thing I do in landscape photography is go out there and talk to the land - form a relationship, ask permission, it's not about going out there like some paparazzi with a Leica and snapping a few pictures, before running off to print them. — Michael Kenna

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see. — Dorothea Lange

Photography is a very forgiving medium. Anybody that can afford film and a camera can make pictures. — Todd Walker

There are too many images, too many cameras now. We're all being watched. It gets sillier and sillier. As if all action is meaningful. Nothing is really all that special. It's just life. If all moments are recorded, then nothing is beautiful and maybe photography isn't an art anymore. Maybe it never was — Robert Frank

You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography. — Ernst Haas

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time. — Susan Sontag

The camera creates a magical transformation. It's not enough to exist; we must chronicle that existence ... Narrative- and image-making creatures like humans don't feel any experience is complete unless it's recorded. — Erica Jong

Look at lots of exhibitions and books, and don't get hung up on cameras and technical things. Photography is about images. — Fay Godwin

Put that thing down, girl. Don't you know it steals part of your soul, that little mechanical masterpiece you hold so frivolously? Don't you know it's not just mine it seals into its gears and trick mirrors, but yours, too. What you feel at this moment, what you hope for, what your dreams are, what you think your future will unfold like, it steals it all from you, too. You aren't safe just because of the side of the lens you're on. And later, when everything is said and done, and you want to forget everything that happened in these walls, when you're all alone, this picture, this piece of your soul you didn't even know was gone, will haunt you. It will come bearing knives and AKs and nine millimeters, and it will destroy you from the inside out. Put that damned thing down and stop acting like any of this is something worth remembering. — Shannon Noelle Long

Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all times ... I just shoot at what interests me at that moment. — Elliott Erwitt

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept. — Ansel Adams

When I first moved from photography to filmmaking, I was worried about how big I had to become. I was one person, or maybe me and an assistant, and I had these small cameras, and maybe a flash. — Lauren Greenfield

Probably one of the worst things that happened to photography is that cameras have viewfinders. — John Baldessari

I'd like my coffin to be a camera obscura so I can see what's going on outside. — Bill Jay

The picture is good or not from the moment it was caught in the camera. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

We've lost these qualities, these abilities to do something by hand. Some illustrators have it still, but it's just not art. We have photography. We have cameras and computers that do it better and faster. — Gerhard Richter

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. — Leonard Nimoy

Your most important gear is your eye, heart and soul. — Marius Vieth

My first priority when taking pictures is to achieve clarity. A good documentary photograph transmits the information of the situation with the utmost fidelity; achieving it means understanding the nuances of lighting and composition, and also remembering to keep the lenses clean and the cameras steady. — Sam Abell

I came to photography with the desire to conquer this machine, the camera, and make it my slave. Instead, I have now a respect for it and all machines as expanders of my awareness. — Todd Walker

Kids and cameras are a big things with me. Find a kid who digs cameras and share one simple photo tip with her. — Nick Kelsh

Photoshop and Lightroom help me transform my photos into what my heart felt, but my camera couldn't quite capture! — Marius Vieth

Let the subject generate its own photographs. Become a camera. — Minor White

For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches - and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood. — Roland Barthes

In a strict sense photography can never be abstract, for the camera is incapable of synthetic integration. — Ansel Adams

There is 3 key things for good photography: the camera,lighting and ... Photoshop — Tyra Banks

That's our cue," Dr. Chadwick noted, managing to approximate a cheerful smile, addressing the room at large. "Everyone please stand behind the yellow line until the doors open. No food, drink, flash photography, or video cameras are permitted. Once aboard the ride, please keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times until we come to a full and complete stop. Otherwise, they're apt to end up in another universe somewhere without ya, and wouldn't that fry your noggin? — Stephanie Osborn

Never ever say the word shoot when you are taking a picture with a camera because a camera is not a violent weapon. — Ruth Bernhard

It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along ... The very activity of taking pictures is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel. — Susan Sontag

There's something really magical about trying to see things in new ways that go beyond, in some sense, the biological human experience. Light-field photography, too, goes beyond the human experience because our eyes work like conventional cameras. — Ren Ng

There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. — Susan Sontag

The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh. — Edward Weston

There is something abominable about cameras, because they possess the power to invent many worlds. As an artist who has been lost in this wilderness of mechanical reproduction for many years, I do not know which world to start with. I have seen fellow artists driven to the point of frenzy by photography. — Robert Smithson

You cannot explain the whole world in one photograph. Photography pretends. You can see everything that's in front of the camera, but there's always something beside it. — Thomas Ruff

People always say that digital cameras are much more stable than film cameras, but the truth is that digital cameras, or any kind of digital technology, is one of the most unstable things in the world. A film camera can last decades if you know how to look after it, but digital things can break down instantly. A violent storm, a nuclear bomb, even something as minor as a cracked screen or the releasing of newer models, can make a digital product just a block of useless metal. — Rebecca McNutt

I'm really into my photography and am trying to catch up with digital generation - I was used to the old 35mm cameras. — David Suchet

For a period of time, I carried cameras with me wherever I went, and then I realized that my interest in photography was turning toward the conceptual. So I wasn't carrying around cameras shooting stuff, I was developing concepts about what I wanted to shoot. And then I'd get the camera angle and do the job. — Leonard Nimoy

[Cameras] tend to turn people into things and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise and, [in the age of photography] the world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects that have been encountered before in some other museum and to say that the camera cannot lie is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name. — Marshall McLuhan

It's a pity I am so impatient and careless, as any ordinary person could learn all the techniques of photography in a week. It is the democratic art, i.e. technical skill is practically eliminated - the more foolproof cameras become with focusing and exposure gadgets the better - and artistic quality depends only on choice of subject. — W. H. Auden

I never said the camera was truth. It is, however, a more accurate and more objective way of seeing. — Chuck Close

As far as digital technology has come, there's still one thing that digital cameras won't do: give you perfect color every time. In fact, if they gave us perfect color 50% of the time, that would be incredible, but unfortunately every digital camera (and every scanner that captures traditional photos) sneaks in some kind of color cast in your image. Generally, it's a red cast, but depending on the camera, it could be blue. Either way, you can be pretty sure-there's a cast. — Scott Kelby

But slowly I began to use cameras and then think about what it was that was going on. It took me a long time, I mean I actually played with cameras and photography for about 20 years. — David Hockney

I just got this new camera. It's very advanced - you don't even need it. — Steven Wright

Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing. — Susan Sontag

Why do we use flash at all? Because photography is not the same as eyesight. We can see in low-light situations where cameras, dependent upon a physical process to record visual information, are half blind. — David Hewson

I loved photography but was frustrated by the limitations of cameras. When trying to take a picture of a friend's young, active daughter using my DSLR, it was impossible to capture the fleeting moments. — Ren Ng

We do not make photographs with our cameras. We make them with our minds, with our hearts, with our ideas. — Arnold Newman

I don't story board. I do something else, which is, I block it. We then train to the blocking. In other words, when everybody's training, they're actually training a lot of the moves that we are definitely going to use, and then, I do a lot of photography of that, and that becomes where the cameras go. — Michael Mann

Oftentimes she wondered what had happened to super 8. Sure, it made perfect sense that nobody wanted the hassle of spending money on a three-minute cartridge of film and threading it through a projector, but though digital cameras were convenient and cheap, Mandy didn't care. Super 8 had integrity, it wasn't just nostalgia, it was art, it was history, it was a little recording medium that somehow possessed the power to evoke lost memories, to turn back time, and there was something dazzling about waiting excitedly for a reel of film to come back in its yellow and red Kodak envelope, eating buttered popcorn while the projector paraded life's best moments, and capturing something beautiful in only three minutes. — Rebecca McNutt

With photography, everything is in the eye and these days I feel young photographers are missing the point a bit. People always ask about cameras but it doesn't matter what camera you have. You can have the most modern camera in the world but if you don't have an eye, the camera is worthless. Young people know more about modern cameras and lighting than I do. When I started out in photography I didn't own an exposure meter - I couldn't , they didn't exist! I had to guess. — Alfred Eisenstaedt

We are there with our cameras to record reality. Once we start modifying that which exists, we are robbing photography of its most valuable attribute. — Philip Jones Griffiths

I think probably something big can be done with cameras, I'm not saying, er, I'm saying chemical photography's finished, that means you can't have a Cartier Bresson again, you need never believe pictures. — David Hockney

The history of photography needs clearing out. It needs something else now. Because photography always acknowledged there were cameras before photography. — David Hockney

The problem for me is that I've never actually studied photography, so it's quite a steep learning curve. Cameras these days do so much for you automatically but I still think there's a point where you should actually know the technical side. — Graeme Le Saux

The camera points both ways. In expressing the subject you also express yourself ... — Freeman Patterson

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

The photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered and too rare to kill. Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature - tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures. — Susan Sontag

The camera is the least important element in photography. — Julius Shulman

I wanted [my photography] to appear as though the camera was seeing by itself. — Lewis Baltz

I know the best moments can never be captured on film, even as I spend nearly half my life trying to do just that. — Rosie O'Donnell