Quotes_Originality

Here’s a selection of my favorite quotes on originality.

“A man’s originality is not only the most beautiful , but his best personality for humanity in life. “- Anuj Somany

“No one can be profoundly original who does not avoid eccentricity.” – Andre Maurois

“But it is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.” – Herman Melville

“Originality consists in trying to be like everybody else – and failing.” – Raymond Radiguet

“Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.” – Charles Baudelaire

“When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.”- Jean Cocteau

“The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.” – Arthur Koestler

“Those who say there are no more original ideas need to get out of the way of those of us who are creating them.” – Steven Symes

“A man’s mind stretched by a new idea, can never go back to its original dimensions.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.” – Thomas Carlyle

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with something original.” – Ken Robinson

“No one ever discovered anything new by coloring inside the lines.” – Thomas Vasquez

“It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.” – Wallace Stevens

“The merit of originality is not novelty, it is sincerity.” – Thomas Carlyle

“Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself.” – James Stephens

“The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.” – Blaise Pascal

“Originality exists in every individual because each of us differs from the others. We are all primary numbers divisible only by ourselves.” – Jean Guitton

“Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.” – Judy Garland

“Insist upon yourself. Be original.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Do your work, but do your thing.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“When there is an original sound in the world, it makes a hundred echoes.” – John A. Shedd“

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.” – W.H. Auden

Find more creativity quotes here.

Read more quotes daily on Twitter and Facebook.

Category: Quotes
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Stieglitz_OKfHands_425

Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes by photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

“Photography my passion, the search for truth, my obsession.” – Alfred Stieglitz

“When I photograph I make love.” – Alfred Stieglitz

“If you can imagine photography in the guise of a woman and you’d ask her what she thought of Stieglitz, she’d say: He always treated me like a gentleman.” – Alfred Stieglitz

“Wherever there is light, one can photograph.” – Alfred Stieglitz

“…the goal of art was the vital expression of self.” – Alfred Stieglitz

“In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” – Alfred Stieglitz

“My photographs are a picture of the chaos in the world, and of my relationship to that chaos. My prints show the world’s constant upsetting of man’s equilibrium, and his eternal battle to reestablish it.” – Alfred Stieglitz

“For that is the power of the camera: seize the familiar and give it new meanings, a special significance by the mark of a personality.” – Alfred Stieglitz

“I have all but killed myself for Photography. My passion for it is greater than ever. It’s forty years that I have fought its fight – and I’ll fight to the finish – single handed & without money if need be. It is not photographs – it is not photographers – I am fighting for. And my own photographs I never sign. I am not fighting to make a ‘name’ for myself. Maybe you have some feeling for what the fight is for. It’s a world’s fight. This sounds mad. But so is Camera Work mad. All that’s born of spirit seems mad in these [days] of materialism run riot.” – Alfred Stieglitz

“My ideal is to achieve the ability to produce numberless prints from each negative, prints all significantly alive, yet indistinguishably alike, and to be able to circulate them at a price not higher than that of a popular magazine, or even a daily paper. To gain that ability there has been no choice but to follow the road I have chosen.” – Alfred Stieglitz

“My aim is increasingly to make my photographs look so much like photographs [rather than paintings, etchings, etc.] that unless one has eyes and sees, they won’t be seen – and still everyone will never forget having once looked at them.” – Alfred Stieglitz

“Photographers must learn not to be ashamed to have their photographs look like photographs.” – Alfred Stieglitz

“I do not object to retouching, dodging. or accentuation as long as they do not interfere with the natural qualities of photographic technique.” – Alfred Stieglitz

“I am not a painter, nor an artist. Therefore I can see straight, and that may be my undoing.” – Alfred Stieglitz

“There is nothing so wrong as accepting a thing merely because men who have done things say it should be so.” – Alfred Stieglitz

“There are many schools of painting. Why should there not be many schools of photographic art? There is hardly a right and a wrong in these matters, but there is truth, and that should form the basis of all works of art.” – Alfred Stieglitz

“The ability to make a truly artistic photograph is not acquired off-hand, but is the result of an artistic instinct coupled with years of labor.” – Alfred Stieglitz

“It is not art in the professionalized sense about which I care, but that which is created sacredly, as a result of a deep inner experience, with all of oneself, and that becomes ‘art’ in time.” – Alfred Stieglitz

“Let me here call attention to one of the most universally popular mistakes that have to do with photography – that of classing supposedly excellent work as professional, and using the term amateur to convey the idea of immature productions and to excuse atrociously poor photographs. As a matter of fact nearly all the greatest work is being, and has always been done, by those who are following photography for the love of it, and not merely for financial reasons. As the name implies, an amateur is one who works for love; and viewed in this light the incorrectness of the popular classification is readily apparent.” – Alfred Stieglitz

“The great geniuses are those who have kept their childlike spirit and have added to it breadth of vision and experience.” – Alfred Stieglitz

Read more Photographer’s Quotes here.

Category: Quotes - Photographers
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Calendar_201312

This month’s desktop calendar features an image from The Great Salt Lake.

Download it here now.

Find out about upcoming events here.

Category: Calendar
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Cartier-Bresson offers marvelous observations on the art of photography.

View more photographer’s videos here.

Read conversations with photographers here.

Category: Video - Photography
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Russell Preston Brown demos the latest Photoshop CC updates.
Smooth out Liquify corrections.
Easily make selections of targeted regions.

Get Photoshop CC & Lightroom 5 for $9.99 a month.
Offer good through Dec 2, 2013.

View more Photoshop Videos here.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

Category: Video - Photoshop
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NECPA272WSV

Get 12% off NEC monitors with this discount code JPCPHOTO.

I use the NEC PA 272W-SV.

10-bit GB-R LED backlit AH-IPS LCD

Internal 14-bit programmable 3D LUTs

Wide Gamut – 99.3% of AdobeRGB

High resolution

Easy on the eye flicker rate

Now with lower power consumption and heat output

Check out NEC’s Spectraview pro monitors here.

Investing in a high quality monitor is one of the most important things we can do to ensure our digital files and prints achieve the highest quality. Visual artists who don’t invest in a great monitor are like audiophiles who don’t invest in good speakers. The monitor is what we look at; the speaker are what they listen to.

NEC’s Spectraview monitors are among the monitors that achieve the widest gamuts available today, making it possible to see more of the color contained in your digital files and more accurately represent the saturated colors that are printable with today’s fast-evolving digital printing media.

Simulating print brightness and contrast with monitors has always been one of the most challenging tasks. NEC’s unique combination of hardware and software solutions are the most sophisticated solutions available for setting monitor white, far exceeding the accuracy of the vast majority of other LCD monitor’s too bright results. As a result, predictions of print quality are significantly more accurate, saving time and media. Use NEC’s Spectraview / MultiProfiler software for best results. It calibrates the monitor’s LUTs and loads ICC profiles directly into the monitor for optimal color space matching.

Read what other top pros are saying about NEC monitors here.

Learn more about the tools I use here.

See them in action in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

Category: Discount, Equipment
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Witness – An Introduction to iLCP from iLCP on Vimeo.

“iLCP is a 501(c)3 charitable organization whose mission is to further environmental and cultural conservation through communication initiatives that create vital content and disseminate conservation messages to a wide variety of audiences.”

Find out more about ILCP here.

Find more recommended Environmental Organizations here.

Category: Environment - Organization
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Chris Orwig delivers an inspring Google Talk about how photography fuels innovation.

Read/view more about Chris on this blog, including his TED talks here.

View more Creativity Videos here.

Category: Video - Creativity
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Condensation X - Prelude

Condensation X, 2002  

It’s not the most dramatic wave; it’s rather small in comparison to the enormous waves you find in the Pacific ocean. The ocean waters aren’t glassy smooth; the wave line isn’t fully continuous; the surrounding waves aren’t perfectly scalloped; and the foam in the foreground serves only as accents, indicating a previous passage, rather than forming a clear and present pattern. It’s not illuminated by the clearest light nor does it glow from within. Still, there’s an intensely quiet presence about this image (Condensation X), deceptively calm on the surface but potentially turbulent below, with an air of mystery (Where is it coming from and going to? What surrounds it?) that makes it powerfully expressive in a complex and unique way. It’s not obvious but it is rewarding. You might say it’s a sleeper, something you might not pay close attention to at first but the more you look at it the more it grows on you.

Being sensitive to times when less is more and more is less will help you get it just right. In today’s constantly competitive culture, it’s hard not to over achieve. But sometimes, that’s exactly what you need to do. Sometimes what you really need is to get it just right – and nothing more.

I like to do my very best. I like to try to do it better every time. Sometimes I try too hard and do too much. I’ve wasted hours, days even, trying to perfect something only to find out that along the way the life had gone out of it. I’ve found that things that I thought were distractions were really things that made something richer and more complex, after removing them. I’ve come to the realization that what I thought were flaws made something perfectly imperfect. This is not to say that I don’t still try to make things as good as I can and even to up my game. It is to say that the answers I’m looking for transcend technical perfection and sometimes are better for less of it.

In the world of photography it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture for all of the details. We have an extensive list of physical characteristics to evaluate the quality of photographs – focus, depth of field, frozen motion (or extreme motion blur, but nothing in between), low noise, detail in highlights and shadows, contrast, credible color casts, believable levels of saturation, no lens artifacts, the list goes on – yet we are much more challenged to describe the quality of photographs on the levels of perception and content, which are more important. There are times when technical perfection can be distracting or worse a cover up for what’s lacking. Photographer Ansel Adams remarked that, “There’s nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.”

It’s a matter of appropriate means. You don’t want to create dynamic images to portray quiet, tender moments. You don’t want to retouch portraits of victims of war, famine, or pestilence. You don’t want to reenact the truth to make it picture perfect.

There are many times when things seem more authentic if they’re not perfect.

Besides, the more perfect your presentation becomes the more attention you call to the delivery. When you want to call more attention to the content perfect presentation may not be perfect for the purpose. Make your delivery effective. Sometimes it’s more effective to deliver just enough, not more, not less. It’s part of getting it just right.

Questions

What isn’t good enough? How do you know?

What is good enough? How do you know?

What is too much?

What is perfectly imperfect?

Find out more about this image here.

View more related images here.

Read more The Stories Behind The Photographs here.

Category: Images - Stories Behind Photographs
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LR_425

PS_425

The Photoshop Photography Program is available to anyone (long term and new customers alike) for a limited time only – Offer Expires Dec 2.

It includes all of the following for $9.99/month with a 12-month commitment.

- Photoshop CC

- Lightroom 5

- 20GB of online storage

- Behance ProSite

- Access to training resources on Creative Cloud Learn

- Ongoing updates and upgrades

(Though not legally stated, it’s Adobe’s intention to keep these same rates for everyone in this program indefinitely.)

Questions? See Adobe’s FAQ and terms.

Category: Lightroom, Photoshop
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