Ansel Adams Quotes - Page 3

You don't make a photograph just with a camera

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.

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.

If what I see in my mind excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph.

I believe photography is a tool to express our positive assessment of the world. A tool to acquire ultimate happiness and belief.

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

The camera cannot, but the photographer can.

The artist and the photographer seek the mysteries and the adventure of experience in nature.

One of the most important pieces of equipment, for the photographer who really wants to improve, is a great big wastepaper basket.

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.

The best picture is around the corner. Like prosperity.

It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium.

There are worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the revelations of great art are equally difficult to define; we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit.

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.

The craft of photography is the key to good images.

I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

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.

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.

Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.

I’m interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.

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.

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.

To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces.

Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.

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.