Ansel Adams Quotes

You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.

It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.

I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful - an endless prospect of magic and wonder.

Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment.

Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!

A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.

In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.

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

There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.

Life is your art. An open, aware heart is your camera. A oneness with your world is your film. Your bright eyes and easy smile is your museum.

I believe in beauty. I believe in stones and water, air and soil, people and their future and their fate.

Once destroyed, nature's beauty cannot be repurchased at any price

A good photograph is knowing where to stand.

Today, we must realize that nature is revealed in the simplest meadow, wood lot, marsh, stream, or tidepool, as well as in the remote grandeur of our parks and wilderness areas.

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

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

I am sure the next step will be the electronic image, and I hope I shall live to see it. I trust that the creative eye will continue to function, whatever technological innovations may develop.

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.

How high your awareness level is determines how much meaning you get from your world. Photography can teach you to improve your awareness level.

We were in the shadow of the mountains, the light was cool and quiet and no wind was stirring. The aspen trunks were slightly greenish and the leaves were a vibrant yellow.

A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into.

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

We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium.

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.

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

I believe the approach of the artist and the approach of the environmentalist are fairly close in that both are, to a rather impressive degree, concerned with the affirmation of life.

Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.

I knew my destiny when I first experienced Yosemite.

Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.

Notebook. No photographer should be without one!

Bad weather makes for good photography.

I know that I am one with beauty and that my comrades are one. Let our souls be mountains, Let our spirits be stars, Let our hearts be worlds.

I have often had a retrospective vision where everything in my past life seems to fall with significance into logical sequence.

Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.

The skies and land are so enormous, and the detail so precise and exquisite that wherever you are you are isolated in a glowing world between the macro and the micro.

I can look at a fine art photograph and sometimes I can hear music.

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

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

Myths and creeds are heroic struggles to comprehend the truth in the world.

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

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.

You don't make a photograph just with a camera

To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces and record the qualities of nature and humanity which live or are latent in all things.

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.

The negative is the score, and the print the performance.

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

We all move on the fringes of eternity and are sometimes granted vistas through fabric of illusion.