Composition Photography Quotes

#1. How the visual world appears is important to me. I'm always aware of the light. I'm always aware of what I would call the 'deep composition.' Photography in the field is a process of creation, of thought and technique. But ultimately, it's an act of imaginatively seeing from within yourself.

Sam Abell

#2. In my photography, color and composition are inseparable. I see in color.

William Albert Allard

#3. I've stolen a lot. Let me think about the best thing I've stolen. Stolen a lot of hearts.

Rob Huebel

#4. When subject matter is forced to fit into preconceived patterns, there can be no freshness of vision. Following rules of composition can only lead to a tedious repetition of pictorial cliches.

Edward Weston

#5. The page is as white as my face after a night of weeping. It is as sterile as my devastated mind. All martyrdoms are in vain. He also is drowning in the blood of too much sacrifice.
Lay aside the weapons, love, for all battles are lost.

Elizabeth Smart

#6. The artistic methods of poetry, painting, photography, and writing share certain commonalities of deep composition: spirit, rhythm, thought, and scenery.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#7. This recognition, in real life, of a rhythm of surfaces, lines, and values is for me the essence of photography; composition should be a constant of preoccupation, being a simultaneous coalition - an organic coordination of visual elements.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

#8. 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.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

#9. As sounds in a musical composition can be used not to express physical objects but ideas, emotions, harmonies, rhythmic orders and most any expression of the human mind and spirit, so light can be used visually to express the mind and spirit.

Wynn Bullock

#10. Nature is beautiful in all its chaos. However, a nature photograph is beautiful only in the absence of chaos.

Mike MacDonald

#11. It is seldom indeed that a composition which was poor when the picture was taken can be improved by reshaping it in the dark room.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

#12. The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity'
of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The subject,' says one handbook for amateur photographers, 'must be simple, free of useless accessories; this is called the Search for Unity.

Roland Barthes

#13. I'll not leave a handful of that dark hair upon your head, if you lay a finger on me!

Charles Dickens

#14. Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform.

Henry David Thoreau

#15. My theory of composition? Simple: do not release the shutter until everything in the viewfinder feels just right.

Ernst Haas

#16. Don't worry about it; only worry about how people like her breed.

Gasmaskman

#17. To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk.

Edward Weston

#18. What Time hath scanted men in hair, he hath given them in wit.

William Shakespeare

#19. I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.

Ken Burns

#20. The first picture of his I ever saw was during a lecture at the Rhyl camera club. I was 16 and the speaker was Emrys Jones. He projected the picture upside down. Deliberately, to disregard the subject matter to reveal the composition. It's a lesson I've never forgotten.

Philip Jones Griffiths