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My Own Favorite Photography Quotes
Short Quotations:
Sometimes less is more -- saying a lot in a few words

I have tried to boil down and distill some of my ideas into short phrases. Here are a few I think may be helpful.
Please feel free to reprint my quotes as long as you credit me, Rick Doble, as the source.

COMPOSITION AND PICTURE TAKING

"This new world, that you create as a photographer inside the viewfinder of your camera, is cut from the clutter and confusion around you -- yet it must fit clearly and comfortably within your frame."
Rick Doble

"Each element and each color in a composition has an energy that requires space. I frame my pictures so that those parts and pieces fit together and can breathe."
Rick Doble

"In most photographs your eye goes to one point. The composition is built around that point."
Rick Doble

"To understand composition learn the standard rules. Then take photographs that break every rule."
Rick Doble

"There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs."
Ansel Adams

"Most successful photographs contain an abstract structure even though the picture is of real things. Learn to see your work abstractly so that you can understand how the visual pieces fit together. One way to do this is to turn your photo upside down or blur your eyes so that you can see the overall structure and tune out the actual subject."
Rick Doble

"I have 2 modes: with camera and without camera. When I carry a camera the world looks different; it is divided into frames. Without a camera, the world merges and flows together and I can simply enjoy the rush of life."
Rick Doble

"The enemy of photography is the convention, the fixed rules of 'how to do'. The salvation of photography comes from the experiment."
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

"When I am taking my experimental photographs, I do not see the same world that others see."
Rick Doble

"A painter's canvas is white; a photographer's canvas is black."
Rick Doble

"With each leap in technology and each foray into new imagery, we must learn all over again how to previsualize -- how to see what the camera sees and not what we see with our eyes." (See footnote.)
Rick Doble

PHOTOGRAPHY AS AN ART

"It is not about the rose, or the sunset or your girl friend's naked body as beautiful as she may be -- photography is about light and how that light reveals those things. This is something even seasoned photographers often forget."
Rick Doble

"I knew, of course, that trees and plants had roots, stems, bark, branches and foliage that reached up toward the light. But I was coming to realize that the real magician was light itself..."
Edward Steichen

"Visual rhythm is essential to photographic composition, as rhythm is crucial to virtually all art such as music, poetry, acting and painting. Rhythm conveys a sense of order but also communicates in ways that are intuitive and cannot be put into words."
Rick Doble

"What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm – the relationship between shapes and values."
Henri Cartier-Bresson

"Understanding and previsualizing how your camera sees the world differently from your eye is more important than a photography bag stuffed with equipment." (See footnote.)
Rick Doble

"No matter how expert you are technically as a photographer, if you do not feel and feel deeply when you take a photo, your pictures will fail artistically."
Rick Doble

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader."
Robert Frost

"A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed."
Ansel Adams

"I believe that time is the most mysterious aspect of being alive and that photography is the art form best suited to capturing a sense of the passage of time."
Rick Doble

"Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment - this very moment - to stay."
Sam Abell

"Einstein established that the real world was a combination of space and time: a space/time continuum. Photography can capture this reality better than any other art form since a photographic exposure is a combination of space via the lens and time via the shutter, a recording of space/time."
Rick Doble

"Below the traditional minimum shutter speed of 1/30 of a second for sharp photos, is another world. It is an unexplored world of movement and light and flux which is as real as a bug in a microscope or as lightning tearing a hole in the sky."
Rick Doble

"The invention of digital photography means that the quest for images of continuous motion (rather than sequential sharp frames of motion) can begin again -- a quest that was essentially abandoned 100 years ago. The feedback of the digital camera now lets a photographer enter this world and learn how to capture what the eye cannot see -- light trails of the passage of time."
Rick Doble

"While digital photography has removed the previous time consuming tasks of developing film and making prints in the darkroom, it now requires many more hours of culling, selecting and editing until only a very few photographs have been distilled from the hundreds shot during a session."
Rick Doble

FOOTNOTE:
Previsualization:
This term was coined by Ansel Adams -- it meant that photographers should be so familiar with their craft that they would understand how to both make the proper settings and also to understand how the film would see the scene -- so that the final output, such as a print would match what they had seen in their mind's eye. Even with digital -- and I might say especially with digital -- what you see with your eyes and what the camera sees can be quite different. And while digital photography makes learning previsualizing easier with the feedback of the LCD monitor, photographers still need to be able to previsualize the scene in ways that the LCD monitor will only confirm. For example, photographers need to be able to previsualize how a scene with a wide tonal range will be interpreted by the digital sensors that have a narrow tonal range. In another example, photographers need to previsualize how underexposing a scene will affect the image as a day setting can be made to look like night (called 'day for night' by film makers) and also dramatically change the rendering of color in the scene.

"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."
-Ansel Adams, The Camera

NOTE:See a list of my other articles here at PIXIQ. www.pixiq.com/contributors/rick-doble

For more about my approach to photography see my book: Experimental Digital Photography.

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