“The quality of place, the reaction to immediate contact with earth and growing things that have a fugal relationship with mountains and sky, is essential to the integrity of our existence on this planet.”

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 .

You don’t make a photograph just with a camera

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.

I don’t know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium.

Image quality is not the product of a machine, but of the person who directs the machine, and there are no limits to imagination and expression.

There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.

Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.

Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.

A photograph is not an accident – is a concept. It exists at, or before, the moment of exposure of the negative.

A big difference exists between trying to manipulate God to give us what we want and cooperating with God so He can give us what He wants.

What’s really funny about being National Youth Poet Laureate is that not everyone even knows it exists.

I cannot conceive curved lines of force without the conditions of a physical existence in that intermediate space.

Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.

In the great drama of existence we are audience and actors at the same time.

We should accept diversity in culture and tradition and coexist peacefully.

The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.