Top 75 Shutter Quotes
#1. In a still photograph you basically have two variables, where you stand and when you press the shutter. That's all you have.
Henry Wessel Jr.
#2. I do not understand what makes me take a picture. Cartier-Bresson talks about the decisive moment, the necessity to function with lynx eyes and silk gloves. Perhaps what happens when you press the shutter is an intuitive act infused with all you have learned.
Graciela Iturbide
#3. It's a lot more than clicking the shutter ... it's the ideas, it's the visual voice, it's the telling the story, it's kind of going beyond that initial thing that just means you happened to be there at the right time.
Ron Haviv
#4. I am a camera, with its shutter open. Someday, all of this will be developed, printed, fixed.
Christopher Isherwood
#5. In the early days of picture-taking, the exposure shutter had to stay open for a long time, so you had to stay really still.
Eve Plumb
#6. When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed.
Eric Hoffer
#7. I say, sir, you sir, who are hiding yourself behind that shutter - yes, you, sir, tell me what you are laughing at, and we will laugh together!
Alexandre Dumas
#8. The decision as to when to photograph, the actual click of the shutter, is partly controlled from the outside, by the flow of life, but it also comes from the mind and the heart of the artist. The photograph is his vision of the world and expresses, however subtly, his values and convictions.
Paul Strand
#9. I shutter to think how many people are underexposed and lacking depth in this field.
Rick Steves
#10. Charlotte, having seen his body Borne before her on a shutter, Like a well-conducted person, Went on cutting bread and butter.
William Makepeace Thackeray
#11. There's a discipline. When you take someone's portrait, you don't have to take 50 photographs, just find that one so that when you release the shutter, that's the image that you took.
Matthew Modine
#12. The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces.
Marshall McLuhan
#13. Change isn't like a shutter click. It's never instant.
Lamar Giles
#14. I attempt to channel my anger into the tip of my forefinger as I press the shutter.
Philip Jones Griffiths
#15. That is why I refuse to shutter the windows. We need more light. Even a flower withers without sunshine.
Jeff Wheeler
#17. It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.
Alfred Eisenstaedt
#18. I would say that the off-frame effect in photography results from a singular and definitive cutting-off which figures castration and is figured by the click of the shutter.
Christian Metz
#19. And each time I pressed the shutter release it was a shouted condemnation hurled with the hope that the picture might survive through the years, with the hope that they might echo through the minds of men in the future - causing them caution and remembrance and realization.
W. Eugene Smith
#20. What is truth in photography? It can be told in a hundred different ways. Every thirtieth of a second when the shutter snaps, its capturing a different piece of information.
Sally Mann
#21. Since 1873, I have been back four or five times. I have used the best cameras and the most sensitive emulsions on the market. I have snapped my shutter, morning, noon and afternoon. I have never come close to matching those first plates. (On photographing The Mountain of the Holy Cross)
William Henry Jackson
#22. Photography, like all camera-made images such as film and video, effaces the marks of its making (and maker) at the click of a shutter. A photograph appears to be self-generated - as though it had created itself.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau
#23. My theory of composition? Simple: do not release the shutter until everything in the viewfinder feels just right.
Ernst Haas
#24. I can't,' I say.
Her mind closes like a shutter, with finality.
I wish, at that moment, that I had said something else.
Tade Thompson
#25. When that shutter clicks, anything else that can be done afterward is not worth consideration.
Edward Steichen
#26. You have a lifetime to learn technique. But I can teach you what is more important than technique, how to see; learn that and all you have to do afterwards is press the shutter.
Garry Winogrand
#27. Be pleased with your real garden, don't persue the perfection of a picture. What you see in a photo lasted only as long as the shutter snap.
Janet Macunovich
#28. When you see such photos, you can't help but wonder at just how sweet and sad and innocent all moments of life are rendered by the tripping of a camera's shutter, for at that point the future is still unknown and has yet to hurt us, and also for that brief moment, our poses are accepted as honest.
Douglas Coupland
#29. I loved to press the shutter, to freeze time, to turn little slices of life into rectangle rife with metaphor.
Deborah Copaken
#30. A slight sound at evening lifts me up by the ears, and makes life seem inexpressibly serene and grand. It may be Uranus, or it may be in the shutter.
Henry David Thoreau
#31. The moment when I press the shutter is fantastic, orgasmic, so charged with the hope that this will be a great, original, interesting, and perfectly composed photo. But like any other exciting thing in life, it is usually spoiled by some ridiculous, unpredictable, and annoying detail.
Jean Pigozzi
#32. What good would it
do to
shutter your windows, never
dream of rainbows or find hope
in promises? Why choose to
walk away
rather than hold your ground
and fight for love?
Ellen Hopkins
#33. It's not when you press the shutter, but why you press the shutter.
Mary Ellen Mark
#34. Sometimes I arrive just when God's ready to have somone click the shutter.
Ansel Adams
#35. I know those kinds of lenses, said Tuppence. By the time you've adjusted the shutter and stopped down and calculated the exposure and kept your eye on the spirit level, your brain gives out and you yearn for the simple browning.
Agatha Christie
#36. Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.
Yousuf Karsh
#37. Awareness is ever there. It need not be realized. Open the shutter of the mind, and it will be flooded with light.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
#38. Everywhere the air had become a vibrant yellow drum. A heavy sunlight freighted the foliage of the trees. Each leaf was a shutter about to swing back and reveal a miniature sun, one window in the immense advent calendar of nature.
J.G. Ballard
#39. In the beginning it was always the same. But. I kept trying. Then one day I accidentally moved as the shutter clicked. A shadow appeared. The next time I saw the outline of my face, and a few weeks later my face itself. It was the opposite of disappearing.
Nicole Krauss
#40. As soon as I look up, his eyes click onto my face. The breath whooshes out of my body and everything freezes for a second, as though I'm looking at him through my camera lens, zoomed in all the way, the world pausing for that tiny span of time between the opening and closing of the shutter.
Lauren Oliver
#41. How it pours, pours, pours,
In a never-ending sheet!
How it drives beneath the doors!
How it soaks the passer's feet!
How it rattles on the shutter!
How it rumples up the lawn!
How 'twill sigh, and moan, and mutter,
From darkness until dawn.
Rossiter Johnson
#42. [The] arresting of time is photography's unique capacity, and the decision of when to click the shutter is the photographer's chief responsibility.
Janet Malcolm
#43. Regardless of how bitter or uncomfortable or ill-fitting an answer may be, irrespective of its hazard or grotesqueness, the Impartial Observer's only duty is to open the shutter and let the photons pour in: uncensored.
John Zande
#44. People would have to learn to deal with old monsters again. Stay in their houses. Shutter their windows.
Erin Kellison
#45. I heard the click of a shutter followed by Max's deep voice. "The way you seem nervous makes me think you don't know that I'm in love with you.
Christina Lauren
#46. If you look at most photography, especially the pictures that grab you, they are not objective at all. Sometimes gut wrenching and sometimes lovely, but the moment someone decides to release the shutter, it is an editorial statement.
John Filo
#47. Philologically, the word Kodak is as meaningless as a child's first goo. Terse, abrupt to the point of rudeness, literally bitten off by firm and unyielding consonants at both ends, it snaps like a camera shutter in your face. What more would one ask. (Explaining why he named his company Kodak.)
George Eastman
#48. There are only two hard things in photography; which way to point the camera and when to release the shutter.
Ralph Steiner
#49. I usually carried with me six loaded plates, which allowed me only six exposures, so that clicking the shutter even once was a serious business that had to be carefully thought out beforehand.
Roald Dahl
#50. Every time we click the shutter, it's like a new day, a new chance to make a clean start, to be original. It's a very exciting and exhausting thing to do.
Maggie Steber
#51. Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
Alain De Botton
#52. Someday ... , we'll medicate human experience right out of the human experience.
Dennis Lehane
#53. How are we supposed to get in?"
Stella kicked the metal shutter.
"Fool of a Took!" Jamie hissed through his teeth. "If someone's in there, they probably heard that.
Michelle Hodkin
#54. We don't know how she got out of her room
It's as if she evaporated, straight through the walls.
Dennis Lehane
#55. The most important thing ... is not clicking the shutter ... it is clicking with the subject.
Alfred Eisenstaedt
#56. Photographs aren't accounts of scrutiny. The shutter is open for a fraction of a second.
David Hockney
#57. Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter, In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore.
Edgar Allan Poe
#58. I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.
Christopher Isherwood
#59. At age four I was a camera. I took pictures with my eyes. I framed my photo within my vision and blinked my eyes to snap the shutter of my memory. Since that time, I've been impersonating inanimate objects at every opportunity.
Sophia Amoruso
#60. Eternity shall be at once a great eye-opener and a great mouth-shutter. -Jim Elliot
Elisabeth Elliot
#61. Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.
Ansel Adams
#62. The shutter of the photographer's camera makes that repeated mechanical sound. That unlocking and locking of the doors of light to send momentary images of the present into the light trap of the past.
Simon Mawer
#63. In my photographs it is apparent that there was no posing at the moment I released the shutter.
Jerzy Kosinski
#64. Thane Ealdian prowls the earth once more. Shutter your houses. Bar your doors. Offer him gold and women to satisfy his cravings. A black dragon is like the very devil himself.
Erin Kellison
#65. Never let anyone get the worst of you. For you too will become just like them
Bradley Shutter
#66. True photographs tend to remain on the streets, the story almost about to enter the edge of the frame of the snapshot or the shutter closing a moment too late, the story having just abandoned the frame.
Doug Rice
#67. Poverty is a great cutter-off and riches a great shutter-off.
Lawrence Durrell
#68. A shutter is clicked, a flash goes off and you've stopped time. If just for a blink of an eye. And if these pictures have anything to say to the future generation, it is this 'I was here, I existed, I was young, I was happy and someone cared enough about me in this world to take my picture.
S.J. Parrish
#69. Good pictures. Tragedy and violence certainly make powerful images. It is what we get paid for.But there is a price extracted with every such frame: some of the emotion, the vulnerability, the empathy that makes us human, is lost every time the shutter is released.
Greg Marinovich
#70. Shutter speed and aperture are inversely related, so that a wide aperture requires a faster shutter speed under any given light conditions. The wide aperture lets in more light, and a faster shutter speed lets in less by reducing the time that the sensors are exposed.
Brian Black
#71. What makes you push the shutter has to do with seeking a kind of perfection, a harmony in the world. You are instinctively aware it's there, but you've got to be completely alert and quick and so deeply awake that it moves you.
Sylvia Plachy
#72. If you see something you have seen before, don't click the shutter.
Alexey Brodovitch
#73. The sucess of your people pictures depends not so much on your mastery of f/stops and shutter speeds, as on the grace and wit with which you handle this intimate interaction with you subject.
Jeff Wignall
#74. If you found yourself in a situation where you could either save a drowning man, or you could take a Pulitzer prize winning photograph of him drowning, what shutter speed and setting would you use?
Paul Harvey
#75. Pressing the shutter has remained a moment of joyful recognition, comparable to the delight of a child balancing on tiptoe and suddenly, with a small cry of delight, stretching out a hand toward a desired object.
Inge Morath