Unclear Words
Category: Photographic Artistry
Get Close
If your photos aren’t good enough, then you’re not close enough.
— Robert Capa
Do You Take A Photo or Make A Photo?
You don’t take a photograph, you make it.
- Ansel Adams
Just a quick note from Dan.
Ansel Adams was, no doubt, a great photographer.
What a lot of people don't know is he was also a wizard in the darkroom.
He sometimes took his work and manipulated it.
Using masks and varying exposures on images he accentuated features
seeking to evoke emotion in the viewer. He sometimes even combined
two or more negatives to create an entirely new photo.
So, he truly did make photographs in a very real way.
Sharpness is Highly Overrated
Sharpness is a bourgeois concept.
- Henri Cartier-Bresson
Sketching the Moment
For me, the camera is a sketch book,
an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.
- Henri Cartier-Bresson
Poetry for Your Eyes
When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do
when they want to read a line of a poem... twice.
- Robert Frank
Momento Mori
All photographs are memento mori.
To take a photograph is to participate in another
person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.
Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it,
all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt
- Susan Sontag
Soulful Photography
When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes.
But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!
- Ted Grant
Sometimes their souls are colorful too.
Snap Decisions and Snap Shots
A photojournalist makes snap decisions; based on the ability
to quickly assess situations and record one’s perceived truth.
- Jack Dykinga
This applies not just to photojournalists, but to all photographers in general.
There's a reason they're called snapshots.
Trust and Rapport
All the planning, intuition, technical prowess, and knowledge,
as well as the trust and rapport you have (or haven’t) established,
will show up in the picture, frozen forever.
- Gregory Heisler
This is something that many photographers, including myself, sometimes forget. It can really hurt a potentially great photo shoot.