David DuChemin Quotes

The cliché comes not in what you shoot but in how you shoot it.

The magic rarely happens within our comfort zone, but outside it, on the ragged, scary edge, where we have to fight like hell to keep from drowning in the unknown.

On the odd days Auto Tone gets it right I assume it's using some kind of voodoo.

Photographers, like few other kinds of artists I can imagine, have an insanely
personal relationship with their gear.

The real failure is to rob this world of the contribution only you can make, and to fail to make work that truly gives you that 'this is what I was created to do' feeling that has no equal.

For millennia our suffering has been the forge in which great art has been made and great lives have been lived.

The second way to control the light is with the aperture in the lens, which is a diaphragm that opens and closes to control the light. It's measured in cryptic little numbers that only mathematicians and practitioners of the occult understand.

Vision is that original spark that was ignited within you and made you pick up a camera to capture whatever it is you saw, that made you turn to shout "Did you see that!" only to find no one there
so you created an image to do the telling.

As long as we're alive and interacting with life, the world, and the people around us, we'll have something to say.

Arrogance and a teachable spirit are mutually exclusive.

The story is told of Michelangelo being asked about his methods for sculpting.
He replied simply that he worked on a block of marble, removing all that was not
part of the sculpture until only the sculpture remained. I suspect this oversimplifies
the art of sculpture, but it's an excellent analogy for photography, which is
essentially an art of exclusion.

Take a moment. What was it you saw when you were moved to pick up the camera? I'm going to pretend I didn't hear you mutter something about thinking "it looked cool." Dig deeper. Was it a thought, a feeling, a simple moment when your eyes did a double-take at the intersection of two lines? Was it a lick of light, two blocks of color?

I am most excited by people, places, and cultures that have not yet been overtaken by the creeping homogeny of the west. I love the color and texture of those places, the vitality of life, and the ritual and symbolism of cultures not yet tyrannized by the need to wear the same jeans and believe the same things.

To do what we should in art is bondage. To tell others, with our art, what they should think or feel or do, is propaganda.

Photographing a culture in the here and now often means photographing the intersection of the present with the past.

Ideas rarely come out whole. They change as they get brought to life. New constraints appear, new directions suggest themselves, and new influences come to bear.

Knowing failure is part of our process, and leads to new ideas, stronger work, and more honest questions, liberates us to peer, a little less frightened, into the unknown.

You yourself are unique
you have ways of seeing your world that are unlike those of anyone else
so find ways to more faithfully express that, and your style will emerge.