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The skies and land are so enormous, and the detail so precise and exquisite that wherever you are you are isolated in a glowing world between the macro and the micro.
Ansel Adams
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It is increasingly clear to me that my art relates more and more to a sublimation of my closeness to the natural world, it's events, light itself, and the positive it is a personal expression based on observation and reaction, that I am not able to define except in terms of the work itself.
Ansel Adams
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When I'm ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my minds eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I'm interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.
Ansel Adams
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As the fisherman depends upon the rivers, lakes and seas and the farmer upon the land for his existence, so does mankind in general depend upon the beauty of the world about him for his spiritual and emotional existence.
Ansel Adams
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I have often had a retrospective vision where everything in my past life seems to fall with significance into logical sequence. Intuition, suspicion, or confidence in new ventures; there is a strange strain within me when advantage is not taken of some situation, the immediacy of recognition of the rightness or wrongness of a mood, a response, a decision - they are so often valid that I am increasingly convinced that we have yet to grasp the reality of existence.
Ansel Adams
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This profession photography is deserving of attention and respect equal to that accorded painting, literature, music and architecture.
Ansel Adams
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How high your awareness level is determines how much meaning you get from your world. Photography can teach you to improve your awareness level.
Ansel Adams
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Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.
Ansel Adams
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We all know the tragedy of the dustbowls, the cruel unforgivable erosions of the soil, the depletion of fish or game, and the shrinking of the noble forests. And we know that such catastrophes shrivel the spirit of the people... The wilderness is pushed back, man is everywhere. Solitude, so vital to the individual man, is almost nowhere.
Ansel Adams
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Image quality is not the product of a machine, but of the person who directs the machine, and there are no limits to imagination and expression.
Ansel Adams
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Ask yourself, 'Why am I seeing and feeling this? How am I growing? What am I learning?' Remember: Every coincidence is potentially meaningful.
Ansel Adams
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The technique of 35mm photography appears simple. One is beguiled by the quick viewing and operation, and by the very questionable inclination to make many pictures with the hope that some will be good.
Ansel Adams
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Life is your art. An open, aware heart is your camera. A oneness with your world is your film. Your bright eyes and easy smile is your museum.
Ansel Adams
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...one sees differently with color photography than black-and-white... in short, visualization must be modified by the specific nature of the equipment and materials being used.
Ansel Adams
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All I can do in my writing is to stimulate a certain amount of thought, clarify some technical facts and date my work. But when I preach sharpness, brilliancy, scale, etc., I am just mouthing words, because no words can really describe those terms and qualities it takes the actual print to say, “here it is.
Ansel Adams
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While the photos at the D.M.V. (New York) will still be taken in color, the engraving is done in grayscale, hence the Ansel Adams feel.
Ansel Adams
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A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into.
Ansel Adams
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A good photograph is knowing where to stand.
Ansel Adams
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Photography has escalated almost exponentially! It is a language which covers almost every aspect of communication; factual and expressive.
Ansel Adams
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Impression is not enough. Design, style, technique - these, too, are not enough. Art must reach further than impression or self-revelation .
Ansel Adams
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I tried to keep both arts alive, but the camera won. I found that while the camera does not express the soul, perhaps a photograph can!
Ansel Adams
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I am probably afraid that some spectator will not understand my photography - therefore I proceed to make it really less understandable by writing defensibly about it.
Ansel Adams
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It is all very beautiful and magical here - a quality which cannot be described. You have to live it and breathe it, let the sun bake into you.
Ansel Adams
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Emphasis on technique is justified only so far as it will simplify and clarify the statement of the photographer's concept.
Ansel Adams
