Galen Rowell Quotes

You only get one sunrise and one sunset a day, and you only get so many days on the planet. A good photographer does the math and doesn't waste either.

I began to realize that the camera sees the world differently than the human eye and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.

When the magic hour arrives, my thoughts center on light rather than on the landscape. I search for perfect light, then hunt for something earthbound to match with it.

I find it some of the hardest photography and the most challenging photography I've ever done. It's a real challenge to work with the natural features and the natural light.

My mountaineering skills are not important to my best photographs, but they do add a component to my work that is definitely a bit different than that of most photographers.

Memory selects single important images, just as the camera does. In that manner both are able to isolate the highest moments of living.

The most interesting parts of the natural world are the edges, places where ocean meets land, meadow meets forest, timberline touches the heights.

I like to feel that all my best photographs had strong personal visions and that a photograph that doesn't have a personal vision or doesn't communicate emotion fails.

A lot of people think that when you have grand scenery, such as you have in Yosemite, that photography must be easy.

I began taking pictures in the natural world to be able to show people what I was experiencing when I climbed and explored in Yosemite in the High Sierra.

The landscape is like being there with a powerful personality and I'm searching for just the right angles to make that portrait come across as meaningfully as possible.

And most of my early pictures failed but about one in a 100 somehow looked better than what I saw.

There is no question that photography has played a major role in the environmental movement.

Theres no question that photographs communicate more instantly and powerfully than words do, but if you want to communicate a complex concept clearly, you need words, too.

If we limit our vision to the real world, we will forever be fighting on the minus side of things, working only too make our photographs equal to what we see out there, but no better.

My first thought is always of light.

I think landscape photography in general is somewhat undervalued.

Today, I'm very careful not to mention very specific locations when I write or give captions.

We mountaineers always live with the feeling that we came on the scene too late.

These days, most nature photographers are deeply committed to the environmental message.