“You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”

To visualize an image (in whole or in part) is to see clearly in the mind prior to exposure, a continuous projection from composing the image through the final print.

A photograph is not an accident – it is a concept.

In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.

Sometimes I do get to places just when God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter.

The craft of photography is the key to good images.

We make images to “honor what is greater and more interesting than we are.”

I know that I am one with beauty and that my comrades are one. Let our souls be mountains, Let our spirits be stars, Let our hearts be worlds.

With all art expression, when something is seen, it is a vivid experience, sudden, compelling, and inevitable.

Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real.

Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.

Today, we must realize that nature is revealed in the simplest meadow, wood lot, marsh, stream, or tidepool, as well as in the remote grandeur of our parks and wilderness areas.

The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!

Let us leave a splendid legacy for our children…let us turn to them and say, this you inherit: guard it well, for it is far more precious than money…and once destroyed, nature’s beauty cannot be repurchased at any price.

One of the most important pieces of equipment, for the photographer who really wants to improve, is a great big wastepaper basket.

No matter how sophisticated you may be, a large granite mountain cannot be denied – it speaks in silence to the very core of your being.

Life is earnest, art is gay.

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one’s own human failing.

We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.

I always feel the movement is a sort of mosaic. Each of us puts in one little stone, and then you get a great mosaic at the end.

Art is the daughter of freedom.

Jackson [Rathbone] is the most artsy, creative and, I think, the most talented.

Art is the right hand of Nature.

The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us