Camera And Photography Quotes

When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear. ~ Alfred Eisenstaedt

The camera's only job is to get out of the way of making photographs. ~ Ken Rockwell

The important thing is not the camera but the eye. ~ Alfred Eisenstaedt

I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything. ~ John Steinbeck

The camera makes you forget you're there. It's not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much. ~ Annie Leibovitz

As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs. ~ Sam Abell

A photograph is usually looked at- seldom looked into. ~ Ansel Adams

I began to realise that film sees the world differently than the human eye, and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed. ~ Galen Rowell

When he settles back onto his knee, he wipes a tear away from his own eyes. "Sherry, until I met you I didn't know what life was. I had no clue that I wasn't even alive. It's like you came along and woke up my soul." He's looking straight at her as he talks. He doesn't sound nervous at all, like he's determined to prove to her how serious he is. He takes a deep breath and then continues. "I'll never be able to give you everything you deserve, but I'll definitely spend the rest of my life trying."
He pulls the ring out of the box and slides it on her finger. "I'm not asking you to marry me, Sherry. I'm telling you to marry me, because I can't live without you."
Sherry wraps her arms around his neck and they hold onto one another and cry. "Okay," she finally says. When they begin to kiss, his hand reaches over and turns off the camera. ~ Colleen Hoover

Behind the camera, I was invisible. When I lifted it up to my eye it was like I crawled into the lens, losing myself there. and everything else fell away. ~ Sarah Dessen

I like things that have to do with what is real, elegant, well presented and without excessive style. In other words, just fine observation. ~ Elliott Erwitt

I'm always that annoying person that pulls out the camera in the middle of dinner and starts taking candids. ~ Maria Sharapova

If the breaking news event has something to do with young people, specifically with MTV's audience, there was a higher chance that I would actually go cover it with a television camera instead of just write the story myself and read it on the air. ~ Tabitha Soren

Light is my inspiration. My photographic images search for dimensions that words cannot touch- the result of intense responses to personal experiences. I do not wish to "record," but rather to touch upon the illusive meanings which I perceive and try to comprehend in this limitless universe. ~ Ruth Bernhard

I have a master's degree in photography as a fine art, and I would call my work primarily conceptual. I don't carry cameras with me wherever I go. I get an idea of a subject matter I want to deal with and I pull out my cameras. ~ Leonard Nimoy

So the thing that's beautiful about the Rolleiflex is that I open the camera up from the top and put my face in and that the camera's all about composition and all about light. ~ Matthew Modine

I began working with a family camera. It was called a Kodak Autographic, which was one of those things where you flopped it open and pulled out the bellows. And I've been at it ever since; I've never stopped. ~ Leonard Nimoy

What is the total sum of autumn? What is its content, form purpose? Its style, certainly, has unity. But what does it amount to? Eh, but what did the summer amount to, with all its greenery and flowers and sun? Fountains of red and brown will shot out soon. That's what the summer amounted to.

And you ask me about movies. I don't know what any movie amounts to. I am looking more for some light behind it, behind the images; I am trying to see the man.

It was Barbara Wise who said to me the other day - and she was right: The film critic should not explain what the movie is all about, surely an impossible task; he should help to create the right attitude for looking at movies. That's what my rambling is all about, nothing more.

Where was I? Yes, rambling. I will tell you the real truth: All that I have learned in my life (and I have seen many movies) amounts to this: Leaves are falling every autumn. I will be there with my camera when they fall. ~ Jonas Mekas

I carry a disposable camera. It takes me back to my childhood, when you had to develop your film and wait to see what pictures you got. ~ Christa B. Allen

This is going to sound crazy, especially in America where there is a total inflation of the word "love," but in a sense you have to love the people in front of the camera. There has to be trust between the one who is behind the camera and the people on the other side, so that they can relax. They have to feel they are safe, and that way they don't have to pretend just because they are scared. ~ Pirjo Honkasalo

I see myself through others eyes and I am made anew. ~ Molly Moore

I get very close to people when I'm shooting them. We would go and shoot a scene with Lucy, and I would spend the whole time telling her about Rob. Then I would go shoot a scene with Rob and tell him all about Lucy. Eventually they wanted to know each other. These are two people who would never have overlapped in any other way or context. We brought to the garden at Rob's office and just sat and watched what unfolded. I remember weeping behind the camera, because I was so moved by the way they connected. ~ Abigail Disney

Few things in cultural programming in the mass media are quite as disturbing as watching Charlie Rose leaning forward, craning out over his table, peering deeply, on the very precipice of an incisive question sure to reveal a real Idea, a slim, almost excited smile starting to form on his lips as he imagines the dawning joy of the intellectual life revealed for himself and his audience, and we move with the camera, oh-so-sincerely, to his guest and see that all this expectation and anticipation is addressed to ... Lance Armstrong. Or Ron "Opie" Howard. Or Gary Shandling ... .. ~ Curtis White

Leaving aside the mysteries and the inequities of human talent, brains, taste, and reputations, the matter of art in photography may come down to this: it is the capture and projection of the delights of seeing; it is the defining of observation full and felt. ~ Walker Evans

Two men with a camera, thoughtfully observing the visual cacophony of one major thoroughfare and the complicated interplay of its history, its present, and the certainty of change, have laid the groundwork for a dialogue and a vision that reaches farther than human eyes can see. ~ Vicki Goldberg

Remember that even just watching animals has an impact. Intrusion into their living space can expose them to predation, keep them from feeding or other essential activities, or cause them to leave their young exposed to predation or the elements. No photo or viewing opportunity is worth harassing or stressing wildlife. In appreciating and watching them, we have a responsibility to protect and preserve the animals that share our state. ~ Mary Taylor Young

Ask me anything, Bailey challenged.
What are you scared of? The question got out of Tibby's mouth before she meant to ask it.
Bailey thought. I'm afriad of time, she answered. She was brave, unflinching in the big Cyclops eye of the camera. There was nothing prissy or self-conscious about Bailey. I mean, I'm afraid of not having enough time, she clarified. Not enough time to understand people, how they really are, or to be understood myself. I'm afraid of the quick judgments and mistakes that eerybody makes. You can't fix them without time. I'm afraid of seeing snapshots instead of movies.
Tibby looked at her in disbelief. She was struck by this new side of Bailey, this philosophical-beyond-her-years Bailey. Did cancer make you wise? Did those chemicals and X rays supercharge her twelve-year-old brain? ~ Ann Brashares

You travel to lush looted countries. parts of earth laying on their sides. barely breathing. hot with rust, infection, and tourist anemia. you and your camera arrive. start tearing at bodies with your lust. it's harmless. appreciating culture. sharing. honoring clothing. the way certain skin exists. ~ Nayyirah Waheed

PERCIVAL: Now, who is telling the story?
SEVERIN: The camera is telling the story. It's watching everything, and you can't lie to it, or it will know.
PERCIVAL: My girl is so clever! No, the camera witnesses the story and records it, but it is outside the story. Like a very tiny god with one big, dark eye ... Which of [the characters] is the authority? Who controls how the story is told? And who is the audience, for whom all these wonderful things are meant?
SEVERIN: They are all telling the story to me. ~ Catherynne M Valente

I don't use a crap camera, I don't eat junk, and I'm not going to a dance where the boys are bores ~ Adriana Trigiani

Under examination by the camera, a human body becomes for its inhabitant a field of betrayal more than a ground of communication, and the camera's further power is manifested as it documents the individual's self-conscious efforts to control the body each time it is conscious of the camera's attention to it. ~ Stanley Cavell

I try to neutralize my figures; I want them to be mythic and timeless. I want them to exist beyond time. I've used the skull caps or cowls to banish hair, which is distracting. I want to isolate the face and concentrate on what is really going on deep within my subjects. ~ Joyce Tenneson

Main thing is just to remember that hard work got me here and only hard work will keep me here. ~ Brandon Stanton

He was really quite addicted to her face, and yet for the longest time he could not remember it at all, it being so much brighter than sunlight on a pool of water that he could only recall that blinding brightness; then after awhile, since she refused to give him her photograph, he began to practice looking away for a moment when he was still with her, striving to uphold in his inner vision what he had just seen (her pale, serious, smooth and slender face, oh, her dark hair, her dark hair), so that after immense effort he began to retain something of her likeness although the likeness was necessarily softened by his fallibility into a grainy, washed-out photograph of some bygone court beauty, the hair a solid mass of black except for parallel streaks of sunlight as distinct as the tines of a comb, the hand-tinted costume sweetly faded, the eyes looking sadly, gently through him, the entire image cob-webbed by a sheet of semitranslucent Thai paper whose white fibers twisted in the lacquered space between her and him like gorgeous worms; in other words, she remained eternally elsewhere. ~ William T. Vollmann

I've decided to recast myself as Utopian. I like this landscape of the M25 and Heathrow. I like airfreight offices and rent-a-car bureaus. I like dual carriageways. When I see a CCTV camera, I know I'm safe. ~ J.G. Ballard

I think Jon Foo and my chemistry is incredible! Foo is a genuine introvert and I'm a genuine extrovert. We're the perfect ying and yang, on and off camera. ~ Justin Hires

Don't bury personal obsessions. Capitalize on them. ``The connection between personal obsession and the work you do is the most important thing.'

-- Be yourself. ``Singularity is what you need.'

-- Avoid self-censorship: ``We are very self-critical in a way that can be very destructive. In our culture there are voices in our head which have taught us to say, `Oh, I wouldn't do that if I were you.' Don't ever think about anybody peering over your shoulder.'

-- Don't be afraid to show off, even if you think, ``I'm very close to making a complete fool of myself.'

-- Don't be afraid to entertain. ``I want to entertain. I don't want to lose people. I feel responsible as I write to give people the best time I can.'

-- ``Love your failures' instead of beating yourself up over them.

-- ``Learn to love the process' of writing.

-- Just do it. Barker likes something director Stanley Kubrick said: ``If you want to make a film, pick up a camera. ~ Clive Barker

It's pretty amazing to see a guy, while steering at the wheel, suddenly raise his little 300 dollar German camera with one hand and snap something that's on the move in front of him, and through an unwashed windshield at that. (On the road with Robert Frank, 1958) ~ Jack Kerouac

My style hasn't changed much in all these sixty years. I still use, most of the time, existing light and try not to push people around. I have to be as much a diplomat as a photographer. People don't often take me seriously because I carry so little equipment and make so little fuss ... I never carried a lot of equipment. My motto has always been, "Keep it simple". ~ Alfred Eisenstaedt

I think, if you put a camera in anyone's life and document it daily from the age of 21 to 27, there are going to be things that aren't always pretty. ~ Sienna Miller

The human body is first and foremost a mirror to the soul and its greatest beauty comes from that. ~ Auguste Rodin

The camera is, in a sense, both a way to get close, and to break free. It is a testimony to independence as well as a new way to relate to the world ~ Elinor Carucci

I smiled for the camera. A grinning domesticated animal. By the time we reached the bottom, the picture would have been posted to Facebook and "liked" dozens of times. I'd be expected to "like" the "likes", and the friendship of sheep would continue unabated. ~ John Kaag

Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures. ~ Susan Sontag

To have an opportunity to get in front of a camera every single day is just priceless because it gets you closer and closer to being less self-consciousness in front of it and really being human and really making choices and standing by them. ~ Katie Lowes

For me, it's not important whether [subjects] are naked, half-naked, or dressed. What I'm more interested in is how they present themselves: if someone is half-naked and having self-confidence or you have the feeling that she has or he has control of the situation. She likes to do it. Then I have nothing against it. But it's true that society doesn't talk about such issues. They just talk about whether there is a breast or not, but for me it's more interesting how the power game of camera and object is shown. And if it's a cool picture. ~ Pipilotti Rist

Me and my Photographs are a bit romantic. I do not take photographs in a normal light. Either at sunrise, or sundown, or early in the morning. Besides I want to explain something in every frame. Every image has to have a message. ~ Ara Güler

To do justice to modern technology's rigid linear structure, to the lofty gridwork of cranes and bridges, to the dynamism of machines operating at one thousand horsepower - only photography is capable of that. What those who are attached to the painterly style regard as photography's defect, the mechanical reproduction of form - is just what makes it superior to all other means of expression. ~ Albert Renger-Patzsch

Anyway, I'm doing my rave and this spittle comes out of my mouth and it winds its way very delicately through the wire fence that separates us and lands clear and bright on Denzel's lip. And we're at the beginning of the scene and I've got to do the rest of the scene, and the camera isn't on him, it's on me - and I'm fully aware that I've just spat on Denzel Washington! ~ Russell Crowe

I wanted to be a car mechanic and I wanted to race cars and the idea of trying to make something out of my life wasn't really a priority. But the accident allowed me to apply myself at school. I got great grades. Eventually I got very excited about anthropology and about social sciences and psychology, and I was able to push my photography even further and eventually discovered film and film schools. ~ George Lucas