Creative Photography Quotes

The best zoom lens is your legs.

I've always thought photography was an art form, but it had very low appreciation in the beginning, except for some Europeans, and of course Stieglitz. Stieglitz always considered photography to be an art form and is the "father" of the creative concepts of the twentieth century.

One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.

A photograph must come from imagination and not be a reflection of what is.

I would photograph an idea rather than an object, a dream rather than an idea.

Best wide-angle lens? Two steps backward. Look for the 'ah-ha'.

There's always been a separation between fashion and what I call my 'deeper' work. Fashion is where I make my living. I'm not knocking it. It's a pleasure to make a living that way. It's pleasure and then there's the deeper pleasure of doing my portraits. It's not important what I consider myself to be, but I consider myself to be a portrait photographer.

Nowadays, people shoot digitally and it's all in color, but you press a button and it all goes to black and white. But it's not lit for black and white. So, it's a tricky thing. If you're going do black and white, you better remember to separate things with light, because color ain't gonna be there.

I feel more like a creative artist using photography because there's - the digital work is so interesting now. It's come to that. I have had many different stages of photography - there are many different ways to take photos. But I feel now I'm in that stage of my life where I use the camera, you know, in that way.

Find the most puzzling kind of art you can think of, and then go out and try to approximate it with your camera. Take a photograph that corresponds to it. (Assignment to students.)

There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

I think there are two types of photographers, those who want to document the world and those who want to create their own world. I am more interested in documenting the world and presenting it to people with the question attached, 'Does this make any sense to you?'

The fact that few painter-fine-artists used photography in their work made it appealing.

I like there to be a joke in practically every photo I take. Nobody has the right to make photography boring.

A good print is really essential. I want to take strong documentary photographs that are as good technically as any of the best technical photographs, and as creative as any of the best fine-art photographs. [...] I don't want to just be a photo essayist; I'm more interested in single images...ones that I feel are good enough to stand on their own.

Some people's photography is an art. Not mine. Art is a dirty word in photography. All this fine art crap is killing it already.

Sometimes I have taken photographs and just felt so excited that I could barely hold the camera steady, and the photo was boring.

Unfortunately, there was no Jackson Pollock of the camera.

I'll go to do a shoot, I'll spend five or six hours at the beach with people, and when people think I'm all out of film, then they really relax and I get my good pictures.

Knowing what I know now, any photographer worth his salt could make some beautiful things with pinhole cameras.

I've found even after nearly 30 years of doing this, there are all kinds of new surprises that rear their heads at various times and I truly believe that 51% of the images, success takes place in the darkroom.

Unfortunately, the greatest photographers don't pay extreme attention to the clothes. If they decide to put a dress in a bathtub or in front of a cow in the countryside with dirt everywhere, well, the dresses come back... ready to be put in the garbage.

The camera is not only an extension of the eye but of the brain. It can see sharper, farther, nearer, slower, faster than the eye. It can see by invisible light. It can see in the past, present, and future. Instead of using the camera only to reproduce objects, I wanted to use it to make what is invisible to the eye - visible.

For those aspiring to make a living from travel photography, it's a sad fact that the boring shots are the shots that are going to make you money.

Dali likes me taking his picture because he is interested in pictures that do not simply reproduce reality. Even in photos he prefers to appear outside reality .That is surrealistic!