“You don’t make a photograph just with a camera”

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.

We were in the shadow of the mountains, the light was cool and quiet and no wind was stirring. The aspen trunks were slightly greenish and the leaves were a vibrant yellow.

Impression is not enough. Design, style, technique – these, too, are not enough. Art must reach further than impression or self-revelation .

The ‘machine-gun’ approach to photography – by which many negatives are made with the hope that one will be good – is fatal to serious results.

As the fisherman depends upon the rivers, lakes and seas and the farmer upon the land for his existence, so does mankind in general depend upon the beauty of the world about him for his spiritual and emotional existence.

Performing in front of the camera is a different thing, and shooting a whole film is another.

From the beginning, the camera and I were great friends. It loves me, and I love it.

I think I’m better behind the camera than I am in front.

Once you develop a comfort level with someone, that translates on camera.

It is important to understand what are you trying to capture with a camera. What you want to use this tool for. It helps to begin to search for and concentrate on thematic photography.

I began working with a family camera. It was called a Kodak Autographic, which was one of those things where you flopped it open and pulled out the bellows. And I’ve been at it ever since – I’ve never stopped.

The camera can capture thought in a way that’s quite surprising and shocking. You can become very simple and minimal in your work and communicate a lot with just a finger or an eyebrow, or a look, or a glance.

I’m not an equipment nut. I tend to use whatever’s at hand. I have several cameras, of course, but I’m not emotional about any of them