Photography Exposure Quotes & Sayings

To me, photography is 90% a retrospective experience. There's the part of pursuing the image, and exposing the film, but once you make the exposure, you're always looking backwards in time. I like that aspect of photography. — John Sexton

I see my finished platinum print (in the viewfinder) in all its desired qualities, before my exposure. — Edward Weston

Cartier-Bresson has said that photography seizes a 'decisive moment', that's true except that it shouldn't be taken too narrowly ... does my picture of a cobweb in the rain represent a decisive moment? The exposure time was probably three or four minutes. That's a pretty long moment. I would say the decisive moment in that case was the moment in which I saw this thing and decided I wanted to photograph it. — Paul Strand

I start with no preconceived idea - discovery excites me to focus - then rediscovery through the lens - final form of presentation seen on ground glass, the finished print previsioned completely in every detail of texture, movement, proportion, before exposure - the shutter's release automatically and finally fixes my conception, allowing no after manipulation - the ultimate end, the print, is but a duplication of all that I saw and felt through my camera. — Edward Weston

Cinematography was incredibly foreign to me, so I read as much as I could about it. Once I figured out that it was just photography with a set shutter speed, I got some slide film and I just went about storyboarding the script and taking snapshots. I took a ton of time doing it just to make sure I knew exactly what I was doing. By the end of it I knew what the film was going to look like - my exposure and the composition and everything. I wasn't scared of cinematography anymore. — Shane Carruth

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

I don't use an exposure meter. My personal advice is: Spend the money you would put into such an instrument for film. Buy yards of film, miles of it. Buy all the film you can get your hands on. And then experiment with it.That is the only way to be successful in photography. Test, try, experiment, feel your way along. It is the experience, not technique, which counts in camera work first of all. If you get the feel of photography, you can take fifteen pictures while one of your opponents is trying out his exposure meter. — Alfred Eisenstaedt

I'm afraid we get a great deal of our exposure to art through magazines and through slides and I think this is dreadful, this is anti-art because art is direct experience with something in the world and photography is just a rumor, a kind of pornography of art. — Carl Andre

Images anesthetize. An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs ... But after repeated exposure to images it also becomes less real ... 'concerned' photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it. — Susan Sontag

What's the point of getting killed if you've got the wrong exposure? — Robert Capa

During photography's first decades, exposure times were quite long ... So, similar to the drawings produced with the help of a camera obscura, which depicted reality as static and immobile, early photographs represented the world as stable, eternal, unshakable. — Lev Manovich

I began drawing as a very young child and had a grandfather who experimented with photography, so those things constituted my first exposure to art. — Sigmar Polke

Photography is inherently an analytic discipline. Where a painter starts with a blank canvas and builds a picture, a photographer starts with the messiness of the world and selects a picture. A photographer standing before houses and streets and people and trees and artifacts of a culture imposes an order on the scene - simplifies the jumble by giving it structure. He or she imposes this order by choosing a vantage point, choosing a frame, choosing a moment of exposure, and by selecting a plane of focus. — Stephen Shore

Still, there is a basic reticence about his approach that feels refreshing in today's culture of maximum exposure. Brandt did not go to great lengths to turn people into icons, nor did he presume to show their "true nature" in something so transient as a photograph. Instead, he used photography's special qualities to suggest intimate things about his subjects, things that cannot be put into words, and may not even be possible to put into pictures. — Sebastian Smee

A photograph is not an accident - is a concept. It exists at, or before, the moment of exposure of the negative. — Ansel Adams

This, too, was like seeing double. This was where my heartaches began.

In combat zones there is no structure, the form of things changes all the time. Safety, danger, control, panic, these and other labels constantly attach and detach themselves from places and people. When you emerge from such a space it stays with you, its otherness randomly imposes itself on the apparent stability of your peaceful home-town streets. What-if becomes the truth, you imagine buildings exploding in Gramercy Park, you see craters appear in the middle of Washington Square, and women carrying shopping bags drop dead on Delancey Street, bee-stung by sniper fire. You take pictures of your small patch of Manhattan and ghost images begin to appear in them, negative phantoms of the distant dead. Double exposure: like Kirlian photography, it becomes a new kind of truth. — Salman Rushdie

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

Something that I consider 'my invention', since I haven't seen it done anywhere before is 'Super-speed photography'. Now normal high-speed photography involves either a very fast camera at a high frame rate or the act of 'freezing' the motion using flash, while the actual exposure is actually quite long. For much of my high-speed photography with flash I was using shutter speeds of two seconds to give me time to break or shoot whatever my subject was and trigger the flash with a sound activated device. But then I started playing with the idea of using the flash trigger of the camera to actually cause the event. — Desmond Downs

To make the essence of man visible in the exposure is the highest art of photography. — Friedrich Durrenmatt