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

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.

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 .

You don’t make a photograph just with a camera

With the RED, I didn’t have this impression at all. I felt that it was as heavy as a film camera. Having this great crew, with the DP and his assistants, I found it making as much of an impression as a very big film camera.

It’s very true that non-actors feel more comfortable in front of a digital camera, without the lights and the large crowd around them, and we arrive at much more intimate moments with them.

I think that if you’re a digital thinker, you can use a digital camera.

I’ll get cast occasionally as sort of the jerk version of myself, and I have fun doing that. But it’s really better for everyone if I stay behind the camera.

There is a bit of acting involved when you get in front of a camera for a video. Even when you perform onstage, you’re putting on a show.

A camera alone does not make a picture. To make a picture you need a camera, a photographer and above all a subject. It is the subject that determines the interest of the photograph.

I am not going to be dictated to by the size of the camera. I use everything from an 8 x 10 to a 35-mm. But I don’t use these modern cameras which break down all the time !

We’ve spent now about 150 years trying to convince ourselves that photographs are reliable evidence, some unimpeachable slice of the real world. That was a myth from the very beginning.