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

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.

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 .

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.