Good Photographer Quotes

#1. What you need to be a good photographer is an overwhelming curiosity and a good digestion. Sometimes you feel blessed with curiosity, sometimes you feel cursed with it.

Eve Arnold

#2. The good photographer will produce a competent picture every time whatever his subject. But only when his subject makes and immediate and direct appeal to his own interests will he produce a work of distinction.

Bill Brandt

#3. Basically I'm always looking for things. Any good photographer should always be looking for something, you know.

Albert Watson

#4. I'm not a good photographer, not a good writer. I'm a pretty regular person whose insecurity is so pervasive that it makes me always feel vulnerable.

Sally Mann

#5. The fashion industry certainly has its obscene sides. The cost of a coat can be obscene. So can the cost of a photo shoot if you're working with a really good photographer.

Carine Roitfeld

#6. A photographer without imagination is not a good photographer.

Graciela Iturbide

#7. If you're not a curious person, you're certainly not going to be a good photographer.

Elliott Erwitt

#8. A good photographer can make you look incredible, even when you're not feeling very sexy.

Cindy Margolis

#9. The public is being spoiled by good technical quality photographs in magazines, on television, in the movies, and they have become bored. The disease of our age is this boredom and a good photographer must successfully combat it. The only way to do this is by invention - by surprise.

Alexey Brodovitch

#10. I always feel when you work with an artist and whenever I work with a really good photographer, I try to give him or her their own artistic freedom because that's the way you get the best work or at least the most interesting work.

Helen Mirren

#11. The problem is I'm not a good photographer. To be perfectly honest, I'm too shy. Not aggressive enough. Well, I'm not aggressive at all. I just loved to see wonderfully dressed women, and I still do. That's all there is to it.

Bill Cunningham

#12. I realize more and more what it takes to be a really good photographer. You go in over your head, not just up to your neck.

Dorothea Lange

#13. A poor photographer meets chance one out of a hundred times and a good photographer meets chance all the time.

Brassai

#14. It is a peculiar part of the good photographer's adventure to know where luck is most likely to lie in the stream, to hook it, and to bring it in without unfair play and without too much subduing it.

James Agee

#15. You only get one sunrise and one sunset a day, and you only get so many days on the planet. A good photographer does the math and doesn't waste either.

Galen Rowell

#16. I enjoy very much seeing a good photographer working. There's an elegance, just like in a bullfight.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

#17. 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.

David Bailey

#18. My wife Mariana is a good photographer too and, like me, she just picks up a camera and takes a picture when she sees something, rather than looking too deeply into it.

Graeme Le Saux

#19. [Robert] Capa: He was a good friend and a great and very brave photographer. It is bad luck for everybody that the percentages caught up with him. It is especially bad for Capa. (On Capa's death in Vietnam, May, 27, 1954)

Ernest Hemingway,

#20. No surfer wants to be the photographer, especially when the waves are good.

Nick Woodman

#21. (1) The more thoroughly a photographer explores his subject with the camera (i.e., the more pictures he makes), the more he sees and the better his chance of getting good results. (2) Even slight changes in subject approach can make significant differences in the effect of the picture.

Andreas Feininger

#22. Once I became a photographer, it stopped me being scared or intimidated by gangs of young men of whatever stripe. Initially, I could hide behind my camera but eventually I came to realize that if I was polite and friendly to them, then they probably would be to me too - a good life lesson.

Derek Ridgers

#23. There are a lot of photographers who have influenced me; some of the great ones, like Herb Ritts, Helmut Newton, and [Alfred] Stieglitz. I draw from all of them. You're supposed to steal from the good ones.

Leonard Nimoy

#24. It's good that everyone has an opportunity to take pictures, the chance to be a photographer. Some are good, too. But the bad thing is that it's very, very difficult to take a great picture. Everyone can take a good picture - even a child - but it's hard to make a great one.

Mary Ellen Mark

#25. A good photograph will prove to the viewer how little our eyes permit us to see. Most people, really, don't see-see only what they have always seen and what they expect to see-where a photographer, if he's good, will see everything. And better if he sees things he doesn't expect to see.

Leon Levinstein

#26. A photographer needs to be a good editor of negatives and prints! In fact, most of the prints I make are for my eyes only, and they are no good. I find the single most valuable tool in the darkroom is my trash can - that's where most of my prints end up.

John Sexton

#27. I hate to say I'm a photographer, because I learned photography as I went along. But I also hate to say I'm a painter, a draftsman, even an artist. I think it's good when you're confused about what you are; it means you haven't defined yourself as an artist yet.

Vik Muniz

#28. I wasn't raised to let a woman walk through a dimly lit parking lot alone. Wasn't born in a cornfield, you know."
Velia turned. "No, I didn't know. So, you're quite a gentleman. Don't we sound like a good pair - the devil woman and the gentleman?

Mary J. McCoy-Dressel

#29. The thing that makes writing so difficult is you don't have the element of serendipity. At least with a photograph, you can set up the camera, and something might happen. You might be a lousy photographer, but you can get a good picture if you just take enough of them.

Sally Mann

#30. Many people when I started didn't believe I was a good fashion photographer, and probably they still think that.

Mario Testino

#31. The photographer begins to feel big and bloated and so big he can't walk through one of these doors because he gets a good byline; he gets notices all over the world and so forth; but they're really - the important people are the people he photographs.

Gordon Parks

#32. It's very difficult to get any footage of yourself doing what you love unless you have a friend who's a photographer or videographer and wants to document you. That was really the idea and the goal from the beginning: to help people get a good photo, and then it was to help people get a good video.

Nick Woodman

#33. A photographer is like a writer ... you're writing with your lens so make sure you tell a good story.

Habib Umar Bin Hafiz

#34. The picture is not made by the photographer, the picture is more good or less good in function of the relationship that you have with the people you photograph.

Sebastiao Salgado

#35. There are good photographers who might elevate themselves to the ranks of the great simply by burning most of their work.

Janet Malcolm

#36. What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days before photography came in a sitter had a perfect right to say to the artist: "Paint me just as I am." Now if he wishes absolute fidelity he can go to the photographer and get it.

Aubrey Beardsley

#37. The process must be concealed from - non-existent for - the photographer, who by definition need think of the art in the taking and not in the making photographs ... In short, all that should be necessary to get a good picture is to take a good picture.

Edwin Land

#38. Capture the moment. It is your only sacred-memory.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#39. I'm flattered by the offers I receive, but there's no real strategy to the way I choose what to do these days. If I'm in a good mood and have the time, I'm more likely to consider it. Often the photographer and team are important factors, too.

Christy Turlington

#40. No photographer is as good as the simplest camera.

Edward Steichen

#41. If I knew how to take a good photograph, I'd do it every time.

Robert Doisneau

#42. I am a perfectionist. When I take a picture ... it's gotta be good.

Weegee

#43. Botticelli would have made a very good fashion photographer. He did eight heads instead of seven heads in a body, which is fashion illustration.

David Bailey

#44. Some presentation authors justify this by saying, "The photographer already knew it was going to be an uncredited effort and it really isn't that hard to take a good photograph.

Neal Ford

#45. To be a good hairdresser, you have to understand what the vision is of the designer or the photographer and then sort of add your thing.

Guido Palau

#46. It's more important for a photographer to have very good shoes, than to have a very good camera

Sebastiao Salgado

#47. If I hadn't been a singer, I might have been a photographer or an artist. But it's singing I love. I sing all the time, and I feel really good that I've expressed myself.

Annie Lennox