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23 Quotes By Photographer Jay Maisel

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Here’s a collection of quotes by photographer Jay Maisel.

“Always carry a camera; it’s tough to shoot a picture without one.” – Jay Maisel

“Never say you’re going back – SHOOT IT NOW!” – Jay Maisel

“If you are out there shooting, things will happen for you. If you’re not out there, you’ll only hear about it.” – Jay Maisel

“Try to go out empty and let your images fill you up.” – Jay Maisel

“Allow yourself to lose your way.” – Jay Maisel

“It’s always around. You just don’t see it.” – Jay Maisel

“If you can capture the element of surprise, you’re way ahead of the game.” – Jay Maisel

“You have to have a lot of ‘overage’ so that your failures aren’t the only thing you come home with. You’ve got to have a lot of things that were magnificent failures, but you want some magnificent successes.” – Jay Maisel

“There are rules about perception, but not about photography.” – Jay Maisel

“When finding the right angle for a shot…’Move your ass.’” – Jay Maisel

“You find that you have to do many things, more than just lift up the camera and shoot, and so you get involved in it in a very physical way. You may find that the picture you want to do can only be made from a certain place, and you’re not there, so you have to physically go there. And that participation may spur you on to work harder on the thing, . . . because in the physical change of position you start seeing a whole different relationship.” – Jay Maisel

“A photographer’s art is more in his perceptions than his execution. In a painter, I think the perception is only the first step, and then you have a kind of hard road of execution.” – Jay Maisel

“Be aware of every square millimeter of your frame.” – Jay Maisel

“You are responsible for every part of your image, even the parts you’re not interested in.” – Jay Maisel

“If you’re not shooting in the right direction, it doesn’t matter how well you’re shooting.” – Jay Maisel

“If the light is great in front of you, you should turn around and see what it is doing behind you.” – Jay Maisel

“As people, we love pattern. But interrupted pattern is more interesting.” – Jay Maisel

“Every picture should have a place you can go, a home, a climax.” – Jay Maisel

“Never put lettering in your photos unless you want it read.” – Jay Maisel

“I don’t see light as something that falls but as a positive force.” – Jay Maisel

“I’m a New Yorker. I don’t believe in air unless I can see it.” – Jay Maisel

“Each picture you take has power as long as it brings experience to the person who’s looking at it.” – Jay Maisel

“If you want to make more interesting pictures, become a more interesting person.” – Jay Maisel

Find out more about Jay Maisel here.
Read more quotes by photographers here.
View documentaries on photographers here.

Making Virtual Contact Sheets

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Using Smart Collections in Lightroom speeds up the process of gathering and revisiting these images. I use Smart Collections―1 Star, 2 Stars, 3 Stars, 4 Stars, 5 Stars, and 3+ Stars. These Smart Collections are critical for focusing and accelerating my visual thought process, helping me to make the most of a location in a short amount of time. I can see what’s working and what’s not, correct mistakes, figure out what it’s going to take to up my game, identify missing shots, and seek out the ones that will bring a set of images together. Smart Collections serve as a chronology of all the ranked images I’ve made. They create a unique kind of journal. Most importantly, they start the process of assembling bodies of work.

I use Collections for assembling like images to develop projects, typically grouping selected images by location or theme. Unlike Smart Collections, I find Collections’ support for a manual sort order essential. Manual sort orders enable me to create image pairs and sequences, continuities that bind groups of images together into bodies of work. (For more on Continuity, Bodies of Work, and Developing Personal Projects, download my free PDFs at Creativity / Storytelling resources here.

Unlike when I used film, where I had to make physical contact sheets to select images, I rarely print my virtual contact sheets. It’s curious to call them by the traditional name “contact sheets,” because they’re not made by contacting film to paper. But, they’re no less essential to my creative process; if anything, they’re more important. Virtual Contact Sheets allow me to edit images at higher levels of thinking. I even use them to select and sequence images for slideshows, exhibits, and books.

I save virtual contact sheets, and sometimes I even save different states of a single contact sheet. I take screenshots of Lightroom’s display of my curated Collections. So many people requested to see them that I started sharing them on my blog. Having to make remarks about my virtual contact sheets helped me obtain an even better understanding of my creative process and my results.

See more Contact Sheets here.

Read more about my Contact Sheets on B&H.

Read about Seth Resnick’s Contact Sheets on B&H.

24 Quotes By Photographer Wynn Bullock

 
Here’s a collection of quotes by photographer Wynn Bullock.
“At forty-two, I decided to become a photographer because it offered a means of creative thought and action. I didn’t rationalize this, I just felt it intuitively and followed my intuition, which I have never regretted.” – Wynn Bullock
“For me photography has been a profession, an avocation. Now it has become a way of life.” – Wynn Bullock
“I love the medium of photography, for with its unique realism it gives me the power to go beyond conventional ways of seeing and understanding and say, “This is real, too.” – Wynn Bullock
“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
“When I photograph, what I’m really doing is seeking answers to things.” – Wynn Bullock
“Mysteries lie all around us, even in the most familiar things, waiting only to be perceived.” – Wynn Bullock
“Searching is everything – going beyond what you know. And the test of the search is really in the things themselves, the things you seek to understand. What is important is not what you think about them, but how they enlarge you.” – Wynn Bullock
“I didn’t want to tell the tree or weed what it was. I wanted it to tell me something and through me express its meaning in nature.” – Wynn Bullock
“A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.” – Wynn Bullock
“What you see is real – but only on the particular level to which you’ve developed your sense of seeing. You can expand your reality by developing new ways of perceiving.” – Wynn Bullock
“The medium of photography can record not only what the eyes see, but that which the mind’s eye sees as well. The camera is not only an extension of the eye, but of the brain. It can see sharper, farther, nearer, slower, faster than the eye. It can see by invisible light. It can see in the past, present, and future. Instead of using the camera only to reproduce objects, I wanted to use it to make what is invisible to the eye, visible.” – Wynn Bullock
“In a photograph, if I am able to evoke not alone a feeling of the reality of the surface physical world but also a feeling of the reality of existence that lies mysteriously and invisibly beneath its surface, I feel I have succeeded. At their best, photographs as symbols not only serve to help illuminate some of the darkness of the unknown, they also serve to lessen the fears that too often accompany the journeys from the known to the unknown.” – Wynn Bullock
“As I became aware that all things have unique spatial and temporal qualities which visually define and relate them, I began to perceive the things I was photographing not as objects but as events. Working to develop my skills of perceiving and symbolizing these event qualities, I discovered the principle of opposites. When, for example, I photographed the smooth, luminous body of a woman behind a dirty cobwebbed window, I found that the qualities of each event were enhanced and the universal forces which they manifested were more powerfully evoked.” – Wynn Bullock
“My pictures are never pre-visualized or planned. I feel strongly that pictures must come from contact with things at the time and place of taking. At such times, I rely on intuitive, perceptual responses to guide me, using reason only after the final print is made to accept or reject the results of my work.” – Wynn Bullock
“What I feel is that the picture-taking process, anyway a greater part of it, is an intuitive thing. You can’t go out and logically plan a picture, but when you come back, reason then takes over and verifies or rejects whatever you’ve done. So that’s why I say that reason and intuition are not in conflict–they strengthen each other.” – Wynn Bullock
“Everything went together perfectly, and this is what I mean by knowing. I didn’t have to analyze anything. I just recognized what was in front of me. All I had to do was set up and take the picture.” – Wynn Bullock
“The urge to create, the urge to photograph, comes in part from the deep desire to live with more integrity, to live more in peace with the world, and possibly to help others to do the same.” – Wynn Bullock
“I feel all things as dynamic events, being, changing, and interacting with each other in space and time even as I photograph them.” – Wynn Bullock
“There is nothing mysterious about space-time. Every speck of matter, every idea, is a space-time event. We cannot experience anything or conceive of anything that exists outside of space-time. Just as experience precedes all awareness and creative expression, the visual language of our photographs should ever more strongly express the fourth dimensional structure of the real world.” – Wynn Bullock
“I now measure my growth as a photographer in terms of the degrees to which I am aware of, have developed my sense of, and have the skills to symbolize visually the four-dimensional structure of the universe.” – Wynn Bullock
“A person is quite different from a tree or rock or stream. By introducing the nude into my pictures, I started perceiving all the things I was photographing in new ways. In contrast or opposition to each other, things became much more significant and interesting, revealing many more qualities than I had ever dreamed of knowing and expressing. By using the nude, I stopped thinking in terms of objects. I was seeing things, instead, as dynamic events, unique in their own beings yet also related and existing together within a universal context of energy and change.” – Wynn Bullock
“For me a nude photograph should be erotic, not devoid of emotion. The body is a sensual thing, sensuality being one of its most beautiful and meaningful qualities.” – Wynn Bullock
“Theoretical scientists who probe the secrets of the universe and philosophers who seek answers to existence, as well as painters such as Paul Klee who find the thoughts of men of science compatible with art, influence me far more than most photographers.” – Wynn Bullock
“I totally disagree with the belief that nature was only made for the use of people. Human beings are not the center of the universe, and, if they are to sustain themselves, it is vitally important for them to be awakened to how closely they are linked with the rest of nature.” – Wynn Bullock
Read more quotes by photographers here.
View documentaries on photographers here.

Free PDF – Bucket List Destinations

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Sign up for our early alert list and get this PDF free.

Download DPD’s Bucket List here.

When Seth Resnick and I started Digital Photo Destinations workshops we picked locations from our bucket lists – and we still do. We go to the places we feel our lives would be incomplete if we didn’t visit them.
What’s on our bucket list? Climb glaciers and into ice caves above Iceland’s Jokulsarlon; fly helicopters over 1000 foot high coral dunes in Namibia’s Sossusvlei, ride camels in Morocco’s Erg Chagaga; sail through the world’s largest ice fiord in Greenland’s Illulisat; glide in zodiacs through Antarctica’s “Iceberg Graveyard”; drink tea along China’s Li River surrounded by its misty mountains; walk through Shinto garden shrines in Japan’s Kyoto (both in spring bloom and fall color). These are just a few of the things on our bucket list.
What’s on your bucket list? If you don’t have a bucket list use ours to start one; you’ll do more of the things you want to do. If you do have a bucket list, you may decide to add an item or two you see on our bucket list. And, if you find a destination that’s already on your bucket list here, we hope you’ll join us.
Find out about our next Digital Photo Destinations adventures here.
See more in our contact sheets from previous adventures here.