Alumnus Olaf Willoughby – Collaborative Creativity

Why don’t photographers collaborate more often?

Collaboration is how we get through the day. Most of us have some kind of interactive support; from partners, teachers, friends and family. It is also commonplace in science and the arts. From Marie & Pierre Curie through Rogers and Hammerstein to Picasso & Braque inventing Cubism. Andy Goldsworthy even enlists the land as his partner.
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49 Quotes On Planning

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Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes on planning.
“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
“It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!” ― Benjamin Franklin
“Fail to plan, plan to fail.” ― Hillary Rodham Clinton
“A man who does not plan long ahead will find trouble at his door.” Confucius
“If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.” – Jim Rohn
“Your life will be no better than the plans you make and the action you take. You are the architect and builder of your own life, fortune, destiny.” – Alfred A. Montapert
“He, who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through a labyrinth of the most busy life.” – Victor Hugo
“Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.” – Pablo Picasso
“Setting a goal is not the main thing. It is deciding how you will go about achieving it and staying with that plan.” – Tom Landry
“A good plan is like a road map: it shows the final destination and usually the best way to get there.” – H. Stanley Judd
“A plan is a list of actions arranged in whatever sequence is thought likely to achieve an objective.” – John Argenti
“People with clear, written goals, accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them could ever imagine.” – Brian Tracy
“Four steps to achievement: Plan purposefully. Prepare prayerfully. Proceed positively. Pursue persistently.” – William A. Ward
“Plan for what it is difficult while it is easy, do what is great while it is small.” ― Sun Tzu
“To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.’ – Leonard Bernstein
“Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.” – Alan Lakein
“Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning.” – Thomas Alva Edison
“Chance favors the prepared mind.” – Louis Pasteur
“Plans are nothing; planning is everything.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
“Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.” ― Winston Churchill
“It’s not the plan that is important, it’s the planning.” Dr Graeme Edwards
“A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.” – George S. Patton
“Plan your work for today and every day, then work your plan.” – Norman Vincent Peale
“It is a bad plan that admits of no modification.” – Publilius Syrus
“If plan A doesn’t work, the alphabet has 25 more letters – 204 if you’re in Japan.” – Claire Cook
“The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.” – Napoleon Hill
“You can always amend a big plan, but you can never expand a little one. I don’t believe in little plans. I believe in plans big enough to meet a situation which we can’t possibly foresee now.” – Harry S. Truman
“Have a bias toward action – let’s see something happen now. You can break that big plan into small steps and take the first step right away.” – Indira Gandhi
“He is the best man who, when making his plans, fears and reflects on everything that can happen to him, but in the moment of action is bold.” – Herodotus
“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.” – Peter Drucker
“Thinking well to be wise: planning well, wiser: doing well wisest and best of all.” – Malcolm Forbes
“Just because you make a good plan, doesn’t mean that’s what’s gonna happen.” – Taylor Swift
“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.” ― Robert Burns
“Everybody’s got a plan until they get hit.” – Joe Lewis
“No plan survives and encounter with the enemy.” – Helmuth von Moltke
“No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” – Colin Powell
“If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.” – Woody Allen
“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” –  John Lennon
“The reason that everybody likes planning is that nobody has to do anything.” – Jerry Brown
“We climb to heaven most often on the ruins of our cherished plans, finding our failures were successes.” – Amos Bronson Alcott
“If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.” – Abraham Maslow
“If you have accomplished all that you have planned for yourself, you have not planned enough.” – Edward Everett Hale
“First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.” – Napoleon Hill
“Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” – Gloria Steinem
“You must plan to be spontaneous.” – David Hockney
“Spontaneity is one of the joys of existence, especially if you prepare for it in advance.” ― Alan Dean Foster
“Happy is the person who knows what to remember of the past, what to enjoy in the present, and what to plan for in the future.” – Arnold H. Glasow
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” – Mary Oliver
Read more Creativity Quotes here.
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20 Quotes By Photographer Cindy Sherman

 
Here’s a collection of quotes by photographer Cindy Sherman.
“We’re all products of what we want to project to the world. Even people who don’t spend any time, or think they don’t, on preparing themselves for the world out there – I think that ultimately they have for their whole lives groomed themselves to be a certain way, to present a face to the world.” – Cindy Sherman
“I feel I’m anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren’t self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear.” – Cindy Sherman
“I’ll see a photograph of a character and try to copy them on to my face. I think I’m really observant, and thinking how a person is put together, seeing them on the street and noticing subtle things about them that make them who they are.” – Cindy Sherman
“Everyone thinks these are self-portraits but they aren’t meant to be. I just use myself as a model because I know I can push myself to extremes, make each shot as ugly or goofy or silly as possible.” – Cindy Sherman
“The still must tease with the promise of a story the viewer of it itches to be told.” – Cindy Sherman
“I am always surprised at all the things people read into my photos, but it also amuse me. That may be because I have nothing specific in mind when I’m working. My intentions are neither feminist nor political. I try to put double or multiple meanings into my photos, which might give rise to a greater variety of interpretations…” – Cindy Sherman
“Some people have told me they remember the film that one of my images is derived from, but in fact I had no film in mind at all.” – Cindy Sherman
“I didn’t think of what I was doing as political. To me it was a way to make the best out of what I liked to do privately, which was to dress up.” – Cindy Sherman
“I’m really just using the mirror to summon something I don’t even know until I see it.” – Cindy Sherman
“If I knew what the picture was going to be like I wouldn’t make it. It was almost like it was made already.. the challenge is more about trying to make what you can’t think of.” – Cindy Sherman
“My ideas are not developed before I actually do the pieces.” – Cindy Sherman
“The way I see it, as soon as I make a piece I’ve lost control of it.” – Cindy Sherman
“I don’t analyze what I’m doing. I’ve read convincing interpretations of my work, and sometimes I’ve noticed something that I wasn’t aware of, but I think, at this point, people read into my work out of habit. Or I’m just very, very smart.” – Cindy Sherman
“Every time you have to come up with a new body of work for a new show, you’re aware that people are just ready to rip you apart, they’re just waiting for you to fall or make the slightest trip up.” – Cindy Sherman
“Believing in one’s own art becomes harder and harder when the public response grows fonder.” – Cindy Sherman
“People think because it’s photography it’s not worth as much, and because it’s a woman artist, you’re still not getting as much – there’s still definitely that happening. I’m still really competitive when it comes to, I guess, the male painters and male artists. I still think that’s really unfair.” – Cindy Sherman
“The work is what it is and hopefully it’s seen as feminist work, or feminist-advised work, but I’m not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about feminist stuff.” – Cindy Sherman
“I didn’t want to make “high” art, I had no interest in using paint, I wanted to find something that anyone could relate to without knowing about contemporary art. I wasn’t thinking in terms of precious prints or archival quality; I didn’t want the work to seem like a commodity.” – Cindy Sherman
“One reason I was interested in photography was to get away from the preciousness of the art object.” – Cindy Sherman
“I didn’t have any interest in traditional art.” – Cindy Sherman
Read more Quotes By Photographers here.

Henri Cartier Bresson – Just Plain Love – Documentary


Insights from one of the greatest minds in photography, Henri Cartier-Bresson (August 22, 1908 — August 3, 2004) A French photographer considered to be the father of photojournalism, he was an early adopter of 35 mm format, and the master of candid photography. He helped develop the street photography or life reportage style that was coined The Decisive Moment that has influenced generations of photographers who followed.
View more photographer’s videos here.
Read conversations with photographers here.

29 Quotes By Photographer Henri Cartier Bresson

 
Here’s a selection of  my favorite quotes by photographer Henri Cartier Bresson.
“It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera… they are made with the eye, heart and head.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.” ― Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” ― Henri Cartier-Bresson
“A photograph is neither taken or seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes a precise moment in time.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“The picture is good or not from the moment it was caught in the camera.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“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.”
“For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.” ― Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Memory is very important, the memory of each photo taken, flowing at the same speed as the event. During the work, you have to be sure that you haven’t left any holes, that you’ve captured everything, because afterwards it will be too late.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“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.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“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
“Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should?” ­- Henri Cartier-Bresson
“While we’re working, we must be conscious of what we’re doing.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“We must avoid however, snapping away, shooting quickly and without thought, overloading ourselves with unnecessary images that clutter our memory and diminish the clarity of the whole.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“A photographer must always work with the greatest respect for his subject and in terms of his own point of view.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It’s a trace.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“As far as I am concerned, taking photographs is a means of understanding which cannot be separated from other means of visual expression. It is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one’s own originality. It is a way of life.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Thinking should be done before and after, not during photographing.”- Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“The intensive use of photographs by mass media lays ever fresh responsibilities upon the photographer. We have to acknowledge the existence of a chasm between the economic needs of our consumer society and the requirements of those who bear witness to this epoch. This affects us all, particularly the younger generations of photographers. We must take greater care than ever not to allow ourselves to be separated from the real world and from humanity.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“You just have to live and life will give you pictures.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Of course it’s all luck.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
Read more photographer’s quotes here.
View photographer’s favorite quotes here.

Free PDF – The Art Of Arranging Images

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How you present your work may be almost as important as what work you present. It’s the art of sequencing or arranging. And it is an art, which involves specific techniques that can be learned. What are some of the guiding principles involved? Here are a few.
Sequence matters. Start strong. Finish strong. Make getting there interesting. Whether it’s a symphony, a novel, or an exhibit. It’s good advice for arranging any creative product. To sequence a project, you can use the metaphor of building a fence. The strongest pieces can be thought of as posts. The less strong pieces can be thought of as rails. You want to start and end with very strongest pieces to create a strong structure. You want to periodically reinforce runs of less strong units with one or more stronger units. You don’t want long runs of rails without posts or the structure may fail. A fence made only of posts becomes something else entirely, a wall with no variation or grace. The number of strong pieces you include determines how long a fence will be, though the number of other images you include may modify length somewhat.
Remember the golden rules of marketing; primacy (the first thing you see), recency (the last thing you see ), and frequency (the number of times you see the same or similar things). Frequency is rated first. Primacy is rated second. Recency is rated third. They’re all important. It’s all about effective memorable communication. So, the most important thing is to have a consistent body of work (frequency). The next most important thing is to start with your strongest work (primacy). The next most important thing is to finish strong (recency).
You can use classic story telling devices (like structure, proximity, pace, length, etc) to strengthen any image presentation and bring to light subtext in and connections between images that give work added depth and dimension.
In short, arranging matters.
Learn more about the art of Arranging in this free PDF.
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Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.