Inspirational Photography Quotes

One doesn’t stop seeing. One doesn’t stop framing. It doesn’t turn off and turn on. It’s on all the time.

Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.

Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.

The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.

A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.

Photographs open doors into the past, but they also alloq a look into the future

A good photograph is knowing where to stand.

Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure.

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

To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.

Since I’m inarticulate, I express myself with images.

Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.

It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world.

If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.

Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.

Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.

The best images are the ones that retain their strength and impact over the years, regardless of the number of times they are viewed.

Art is not in the …eye of the beholder. It’s in the soul of the artist.

The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.

It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.

Essentially what photography is is life lit up.

A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.

A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.

Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving.

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

Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.

If I saw something in my viewfinder that looked familiar to me, I would do something to shake it up.

The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.

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.

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.

Never boss people around. It’s more important to click with people than to click the shutter.

Photography is a love affair with life.

Photography is a language more universal than words.

The camera has always been a guide, and it’s allowed me to see things and focus on things that maybe an average person wouldn’t even notice.

A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they’ll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won’t do a thing for you if you don’t have anything in your head or in your heart.

Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography.

When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.

If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.

Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.

In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.

Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer – and often the supreme disappointment.

Always remember to make room to shoot what you love. It’s the only way to keep your heart beating as a photographer.

When you photograph people in color you photograph their clothes. When you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their soul!

When I photograph, what I’m really doing is seeking answers to things.

You don’t make a photograph just with a camera

If you are out there shooting, things will happen for you. If you’re not out there, you’ll only hear about it.

My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.

A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective.

It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.

Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper the photographer begins with the finished product.

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.

You don’t take a photograph, you make it.

If you see something that moves you, and then snap it, you keep a moment.

My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.

If the photographer is interested in the people in front of his lens, and if he is compassionate, it’s already a lot. The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.

Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.

There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.

It’s one thing to make a picture of what a person looks like, it’s another thing to make a portrait of who they are.

Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.

I like to photograph anyone before they know what their best angles are.

Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.

Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.

Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.

Beauty can be seen in all things.

If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.

The camera adds a certain sheen to things. Something about being frozen in time really makes things sparkle.

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

What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.

For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.

I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.

When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I’d like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.

To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.

I am forever chasing light. Light turns the ordinary into the magical.

Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes one photograph, or a group of them, can lure our sense of awareness.