photography challenges Quotes

I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term - meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching - there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.

At the beginning, people laughed at me because I was using snappies. Sometimes, a celebrity would look at my camera and go, Oh, I've got one of those. I'd feel like handing it to them and saying, Well, you take the pictures then. But I like using snapshot cameras because they're idiot-proof. I have bad eyesight, and I'm no good at focusing big cameras.

When I started Shutterstock, I tried to get people access to big events. It's very hard to keep up, to publish them quick, and to get the right photographers.

I don't roam around with a camera and never did. I took pictures in spurts, for my books, for some assignments or on special occasions. Like people who take out their cameras for Christmas and birthdays. Each time, like them, probably, I feel it’s the first time and as if I would have to relearn the moves. Luckily, it comes pretty fast, like riding a bike.

None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer.

Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult. It is easy because its technical rudiments can readily be mastered by anyonwith a few simple instructions. It is difficult because, while while the artist working in any other medium begins with a blank surface and gradually brings his conception into being, the photographer is the only imagemaker who begins with the picture completed. His emotions, his knowledge, and his native talent are brought into focus and fixed beyond recall the moment the shutter of his camera has closed.

I photographed with film for many years; now that I work in digital, the difference is enormous. The quality is unbelievable: I don't use flash, and with digital I can even work in very bad light. Also, it's a relief not to lose photographs to x-ray machines in airports.

It's usually so fraught when you're taking a picture. I work with an 8-by-10 view camera and there's a, you know, hood that I put over my head, and it's tricky and complicated.

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

When the light is right and everything is working for me, I feel as tense as when making a difficult maneuver high on a mountain. A minute - and sometimes mere seconds - can make the difference between a superb image and a mundane one.

I do note that photography, a despised medium to work in, is full of empty phonies and worthless commercial people. That presents quite a challenge to the man who can take delight in being in a very difficult, disdained medium.

People put barriers up in your path, and one of those barriers is age. They tell you, "You're too old. You don't photograph so well anymore." I know I don't photograph so well anymore, so what can I do? I can do something different, where it doesn't matter as much how I look.

Some people, myself in particular, have an adversarial relationship with the camera, and it sprouts up in every photograph.

DSLRs take beautiful pictures, but they are hard to focus.

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)

So many people dislike themselves so thoroughly that they never see any reproduction of themselves that suits. None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer.

Sometimes photographing people is like pulling teeth, trying to get some sort of personality.

It's in trying to direct the traffic between Artiface [sic] and Candor, without being run over, that I'm confronted with the questions about photography that matter most to me.

One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.

I taught up in Maine a couple of times and wasn't able to take a single picture. All that blue sky! Ugh. Sparkling clear air, just terrible. I couldn't do it.

There are things that happen so quickly. A better cameraman can capture them, but if the light is not bright and you hoist up your camera by the time you've dialed in your settings. There are eye blink moments where you're like "Aaahhhh, I wish," but those are too many to catalogue. Nothing really sticks out.

There are almost too many possibilities. Photography is in direct proportion with our time: multiple, faster, instant. Because it is so easy, it will be more difficult.

I loved photography but was frustrated by the limitations of cameras. When trying to take a picture of a friend's young, active daughter using my DSLR, it was impossible to capture the fleeting moments.

If you travel 11 months a year - from one dangerous or isolated situation to the next - if you live in hotels, and every relationship with another human being is a two-week relationship, the only other people who have any idea what you're going through or how strung out you are are other photographers.

Note 4. For these and other reasons the cat is also very hard to photograph. The best photographs are instantaneous, as the mere breathing of a cat will blur the fur in a time exposure.