Nature Photography Quotes

Everyone started to have a camera. That's when I started to travel outside of New York and go into nature.

I've worked with the Los Angeles Zoo for 45 years, and we have this magnificent photographer, Tad Motoyama. He takes these wonderful, wonderful animal pictures. All through the years he's given me copies of these pictures. Well, I have all these gorgeous ones, so I said, 'Tad, I want to do a book with your picture on one side.'

Some of my most special shooting experiences have been at weekends.

I wish that all of nature's magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed.

I make photographs and still make photographs of the natural environment. It's a love because that was part of my life before I was involved in photography.

Fog is my weakness, and every time there is low fog, I am out and about with my camera.

My favorite place to go is Zabriskie Point in Death Valley. If you see it at sunrise and sunset, it's like you're on Mars.

So when I became interested in photography and further being inspired by the work that I saw of Ansel and others, it was a natural extension to go back to these places that I knew as a kid and explore them with my camera.

My first experience with film was through a still camera. I would sit, very much against my will, with my father in the game reserve, watching some elephant or rhino or whatever, through a 400 millimeter lens and wait, and waiting and waiting.

What my eyes seek in these encounters is not just the beauty traditionally revered by wildlife photographers. The perfection I seek in my photographic composition is a means to show the strength and dignity of animals in nature.

I'm trying to go beyond the traditional cliches of an African safari.

Noise does not disturb me, as I think that it gives a quaint atmosphere to a picture that fully matches my vision of nature and the wild species I like to photograph.

Anytime my daughter and I go for a hike, we bring a drone with us and get some really interesting views.

In GENESIS, my camera allowed nature to speak to me. And it was my privilege to listen.

When you live by the sea, there are definite seasons when you can see the weather coming and going, which lends itself to photography.

My perfect weekend... anything to do with nature.

One of my favorite shots was on these, like, lava rocks - but moss was growing on it, and I was lying on it, and it was really green, and the picture was really pretty.

I went to Yosemite as an homage to Ansel Adams. I could never be Ansel Adams, but to know that's there for us - there's so much for us in this country.

The pieces I've written for 'Outside' magazine are definitely my best work, and they're virtually all about the outdoors.

I don't see the point of photographing trees or rocks because they're there and anyone can photograph them if they're prepared to hang around and wait for the light.

The Earth is Art, The Photographer is only a Witness.

My youngest son becomes an award-winning nature photographer, and I cannot resist writing poems to his pictures. My daughter loves to cook, though I do not. Yet together, we write a cookbook with fairy tales. And now a second.

To copy Nature? A boy with a camera can do that. To get the spirit of Nature? A woodman or a shepherd can follow the trail of the whistling wind to hoarded sunshine in distant wolds. But to interpret Nature and inform it with a human personality that rises above it, invokes the divine in it, is the work of genius.

Harry is heavily into camping, and every year in the late fall, he makes us all go to Assateague, which is an island on the Atlantic Ocean famous for its wild horses. I realize that the concept of wild horses probably stirs romantic notions in many of you, but this is because you have never met any wild horses in person. In person, they are like enormous hooved rats. They amble up to your camp site, and their attitude is: We're wild horses. We're going to eat your food, knock down your tent and poop on your shoes. We're protected by federal law, just like Richard Nixon.

That experience of being at Mt. St. Helen's was really formative. I don't even know if I'd be a photographer. It was an essential moment for me.