Viewfinder Quotes & Sayings

Janie walked back over with a bouquet of nine white, long stem roses and one white. — Michelle Hughes

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

Adjust the viewfinder to your eyesight. This step is critical; if you don't set the viewfinder to your eyesight, subjects that appear out of focus in the viewfinder might actually be in focus, and vice versa. If you wear glasses while shooting, adjust the viewfinder with your glasses on - and don't forget to reset the viewfinder focus if you take off your glasses or your prescription changes. — Julie Adair King

They were friends. That's all she ever seemed to have. Friends. She had enough of them. — Melissa De La Cruz

'Ornithologists concluded that migratory birds take hundreds of naps as they fly; they also practice unilateral eye closure, in which one eye closes, thereby permitting half the brain to sleep.' Is this what happens when photographers close one eye to look through a viewfinder? If so, they might be operating with only half a brain. Perhaps that explains ... — Bill Jay

I remember it as if it were today ... seeing him [Che] framed in the viewfinder, with that expression. I am still startled by the impact ... it shakes me so powerfully. (On his iconic photo of Che Guevara) — Alberto Korda

The scientific method is nearly perfect for understanding the physical aspects of our life. But it is a radically limited viewfinder in its inability to offer values, morals and meanings that are at the center of our lives. — Huston Smith

A Leica camera is a camera we can keep both eyes open. You can look for the free eye that doesn't look to viewfinder and in all directions. It's like backwards - and sometimes also backwards, and you can look for the viewfinder and see your picture. — Horst Faas

Her eyes rounded. "They don't open until eleven."
"Unless you're me, and you strike up a conversation with the prep cook who starts work at seven."
"Ah."
"Get your mind out of the gutter," he said, uncurling his forefinger from around his own cup to point it at her. "His name is George and he has a wife and three kids."
"My mind's not in the gutter!" Well, not since she woke from a twenty-minute midnight doze during which she'd imagined herself stretched out on her bed, Gage standing at its foot, slowing stripping off his clothes.
He grinned at her, then reached into his front pocket to pull free a slim camera. Still juggling his coffee, he managed to bring the viewfinder to his eye and snap a shot. "I'll call it 'Guilty as Charged.'"
"That's an invasion of privacy," she said, frowning at him.
"I think that blush indicates that you've been mentally invading mine."
"Gage! — Christie Ridgway

Later, Jenny would say she seldom knew what she would take a picture of when she picked up a camera, that she only knew once she peered through the viewfinder, as if the photograph had finally found her. — Whitney Otto

A dad standing up near the stands' top with a Toshiba viewfinder to his eye takes a tomahawking baton directly in the groin and falls forward onto somebody eating a Funnel Cake, and they take out good bits of several rows below them, and there's an extended halt to the action, during which I decamp
steering clear of the sixteen-year-olds on the basketball court
and as I clear the last row yet another baton comes wharp-wharping cruelly over my shoulder, caroming viciously off big R.'s inflated thigh. — David Foster Wallace

I don't particularly care about photographic authorship. Whether an astronaut who doesn't even have a viewfinder makes an image, a robotic camera, a military photographer, or Mike Light really doesn't matter. What matters is the context of the final photograph and the meaning it generates within that context. — Michael Light

Whatever the theories may be of woman's dependence on man, in the supreme moments of her life he can not bear her burdens. Alone she goes to the gates of death to give life to every man that is born into the world. No one can share her fears, no one can mitigate her pangs; and if her sorrow is greater than she can bear, alone she passes beyond the gates into the vast unknown. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

I really don't worry too much about what I see through the viewfinder, at least not at that point, especially if I'm using a flash because I don't know what it's going to do. I just see vague potentiality. It's really working with a set of attributes that will hopefully interact in an interesting way. — John Divola

If I saw something in my viewfinder that looked familiar to me, I would do something to shake it up. — Garry Winogrand

Animals give me more pleasure through the viewfinder of a camera than they ever did in the crosshairs of a gunsight. — James Stewart

One eye of the photographer looks wide open through the viewfinder, the other, the closed looks into his own soul. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

I consider Khomeini's position dangerous. He does not have the right to pass judgment-that is not the Islamic way. — Naguib Mahfouz

Sometimes I photograph without looking through the viewfinder. I have mastered that well enough, it is almost as if I were looking through it. — Josef Koudelka

My theory of composition? Simple: do not release the shutter until everything in the viewfinder feels just right. — Ernst Haas

There's nothing I like better than talking to kids, just sharing the music with them. To relate to them, you need to play songs they're familiar with. — Jake Shimabukuro

To do a portrait today, I decide how close I can get to my subject. First, of course, mentally or intellectually, then in the viewfinder. Music cues the subject and me when to shoot. The music played during a photography session is most important - stimulating to the subject and to me. As in a film, the music builds or becomes quiet, romantic; just one note sets the actor up to emote for his audience. I want a reciprocal portrait, not a bureaucratic one — Victor Skrebneski

I don't know, Dom, I think they just called you stupid. — Ruth Cardello

The fact is, when I look in the viewfinder, if I do see it as a picture, I'll do something to change it. Because, in the end, the pictures that you see when you're working are the pictures that you know already. Either somebody else's made them, or you've done it already. I'm not interested in that. (quoted in MOMA 2001: — Jane Tormey

I brought the Beetle to life with a roar. Well. Not really a roar. A Volkswagen Bug doesn't roar. But it sort of growled ... — Jim Butcher

Alone time is when I distance myself from the voices of the world so I can hear my own. — Oprah Winfrey

I have spent too much time with my eye glued to the viewfinder and ended up missing both the image of the mind and that on film. — Doug Peacock

The digital process gives me total control over how I want the film to look. The films look like they did when I was first looking through the viewfinder. — William Friedkin

Your words...
I hold them deep
like ancient skins
hold wrinkles. — Sanober Khan

For me, looking at small images somehow recreates the experience of looking through a viewfinder ... At this size they're edible. You don't just scan them. You take them in all at once. — Judy Fiskin

Kids started having their own cameras, en masse, in the 1960s. Kodak Instamatics, which came out in 1963, were inexpensive ($16) and easy to use, durable and small, the perfect size to fit in a child's pocket or the upper tray of a footlocker on its way to summer camp. The Instagram logo, in a conscious nod, echoes the look of the early Instamatics - a dark stripe on top, metallic on the bottom, with a round flat lens and viewfinder in the middle. The — Nancy Jo Sales

I set her on her wooden baby seat so her little hiney don't fall in and soon as I turn my back, she off that pot running. — Kathryn Stockett

Something very ugly to you as a person can look beautiful through the viewfinder, but being able to find that beauty, oftentimes, means seeing the humanity within the frame. If you turn that off completely, you don't see at all. — Zana Briski

A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house. Except for the chrome hooks, he was an ordinary-looking man of fifty or so. — Raymond Carver

I use primal imagery, so maybe it's fitting that I use the most primitive of cameras [pinhole cameras]. Since there's no viewfinder, the image is much more of a surprise - as if some outsider came and looked at earth for the first time. — Barbara Ess

Looking through the viewfinder for me is like being in a movie theater. That's what I like about it. — Lou Reed

Leadership is the capacity to turn vision into reality. — Warren Bennis

We're so distracted, we're missing out own lives. The parent who records his kid's dance recital or first steps or graduation is so busy trying to capture the moment--to create a thing that proves that they were there--they miss out on actually living and enjoying the moment.
I've done this before with my camera. I have jockeyed for position, bumping elbows with other parents so I could get into the best spot to look through the viewfinder of my SLR to capture the moment of my daughter's dance recital. Five-year-old Phoebe was so cute in her little sailor outfit, tapping away. And I got some great pictures. It's just that while I remember getting the pictures, I do not recall the moment. So much of the time we don't trust ourselves to experience our world without stuff. Things so often don't enhance our lives, but are barriers to fully living our lives. — Dave Bruno

I saw a man walk into my camera viewfinder from the left. He took a pistol out of his holster and raised it. I had no idea he would shoot. It was common to hold a pistol to the head of prisoners during questioning. So I prepared to make that picture - the threat, the interrogation. But it didn't happen. The man just pulled a pistol out of his holster, raised it to the VC's head and shot him in the temple. I made a picture at the same time. (On his 1968 photograph of the summary street corner execution of prisoner Nguyen Van Lem by South Vietnam's police chief, Lt. Col. Nguyen Ngoc Loan.) — Eddie Adams

The key question of time travel," my father says, "is this: How do we know what it means to perceive an event as presently occurring, rather than as a memory of a past event? How can we tell present from past? And how do we move the infinitesimal window of the present through the viewfinder at such a constant rate? Why can we see a faraway snow-tipped mountain range, or a jet taking off, or the moon, or the sun, or stars, and not an event that took place a moment ago, let alone a month ago, a year, thirty-three years ago? — Charles Yu