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22 Quotes By Photographer Sally Mann

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Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes by Sally Mann.
“One of the things my career as an artist might say to young artists is: The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best. And unless you photograph what you love, you are not going to make good art.” – Sally Mann
“it’s always been my philosophy to try to make art out of the everyday and ordinary…it never occurred to me to leave home to make art.” – Sally Mann
“Unless you photograph what you love, you are not going to make good art.” – Sally Mann
“ If I could be said to have any kind of aesthetic, it’s sort of a magpie aesthetic—I just go and pick up whatever is around. If you think about it, the children were there, so I took pictures of my children. It’s not that I’m interested in children that much or photographing them—it’s just that they were there…” – Sally Mann
“Every image is in some way a “portrait,” not in the way that it would reproduce the traits of a person, but in that it pulls and draws (this is the semantic and etymological sense of the word), in that it extracts something, an intimacy, a force.” – Sally Mann
“I struggle with enormous discrepancies: between the reality of motherhood and the image of it, between my love for my home and the need to travel, between the varied and seductive paths of the heart. The lessons of impermanance, the occasional despair and the muse, so tenuously moored, all visit their needs upon me and I dig deeply for the spiritual utilities that restore me: my love for the place, for the one man left, for my children and friends and the great green pulse of spring.” – Sally Mann
“When the good pictures come, we hope they tell truths, but truths “told slant,” just as Emily Dickinson commanded. ” – Sally Mann
“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
“I think truth is a layered phenomenon. There are many truths that accumulate and build up. I am trying to peel back and explore these rich layers of truth. All truths are difficult to reach.” – Sally Mann
“If it doesn’t have ambiguity, don’t bother to take it. I love that, that aspect of photography—the mendacity of photography—it’s got to have some kind of peculiarity in it or it’s not interesting to me.” – Sally Mann
“Some of my pictures are poem-like in the sense that they are very condensed, haiku-lik. There are others that, if they were poetry, would be more like Ezra Pound. There is a lot of information in most of my pictures, but not the kind of information you see in documentary photography. There is emotional information in my photographs.” – Sally Mann
“I wish I could be a better writer, but writing is so difficult. I get seduced by visual aesthetics. Because I just like making beautiful pictures, sometimes I wander away from making a clear statement.” – Sally Mann
“There is a great quote from a female writer. She said, ‘If you don’t break out in a sweat of fear when you write, you are not writing well enough.” I tend to agree. I think my best pictures come when I push myself.” – Sally Mann
“I like to make people a little uncomfortable. It encourages them to examine who they are and why they think the way they do.” – Sally Mann
“Sometimes I think the only memories I have are those that I’ve created around photographs of me as a child. Maybe I’m creating my own life. I distrust any memories I do have. They may be fictions, too.” – Sally Mann
“Like all photographers, I depend on serendipity… I pray for what might be referred to as the angel of chance.” – Sally Mann
“I’m so worried that I’m going to perfect [my] technique someday. I have to say its unfortunate how many of my pictures do depend upon some technical error.” – Sally Mann
“All the good pictures that came so easily now make the next set of pictures virtually impossible in your mind.” – Sally Mann
“There’s always a time in any series of work where you get to a certain point and your work is going steadily and each picture is better than the next, and then you sort of level off and that’s when you realize that it’s not that each picture is better then the next, it’s that each picture up’s the ante. And that every time you take one good picture, the next one has got to be better.” – Sally Mann
“ Sometimes, when I get a good picture, it feels like I have taken another nervous step into increasingly rarified air. Each good-news picture, no matter how hard-earned, allows me only a crumbling foothold on this steepening climb—an ascent whose milestones are fear and doubt.” – Sally Mann
“As an artist your trajectory just has to keep going up. the thing that subverts your next body of work is the work you’ve taken before.” – Sally Mann
“Photographs open doors into the past but they also allow a look into the future.” – Sally Mann
Read more Photographer’s Quotes here.
View Photographer’s Documentaries here.

Free PDF – The 8 Classic Shots That Make Photo Essays Work

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PhotoEssayPDF
Every picture tells a story. Combine pictures to form an essay and your storytelling options expand. This is one way to tell a more complete story, add depth, complexity, counterpoint, nuance, show change over time, and so much more. A photo essay transcends a single lucky shot. It demonstrates committment, focus, versatility, and skills of another order. Photo essays have more definite structures, with a clear beginning, middle, and end – often with standard components that flesh out and advance a story in critical ways.
Identifying the necessary components of an essay is the first step. Once you know the types of images you need to tell your story, you’ll know what to shoot while you’re on location and maybe even when you need to be there. If you don’t identify these elements beforehand and make sure you come back with each of them, you may find you lack critical pieces. There will be holes in your story. And you may have to return to finish it – if you can.
Here’s are the classic shots used to structure a photo essay.
1            Introduction
2            Set the Stage
3            Identify the Main Character
4            Significant Detail
5            Human Interest
6            Decisive Moment
7            Outcome
8            Conclusion
You could say all other images included in an essay are just variations of these few types of images. I’d be surprised if exceptions couldn’t be found, but they would be exceptions.
Learn more about each shot in this free PDF.
Subscribe to Insights enews and download it free.

28 Quotes By Photographer Annie Leibovitz

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Here’s a collection  of my favorite quotes by photographer Annie Liebovitz.
“The first thing I did with my very first camera was climb Mt. Fuji. Climbing Mt. Fuji is a lesson in determination and moderation. It would be fair to ask if I took the moderation part to heart. But it certainly was a lesson in respecting your camera. If I was going to live with this thing, I was going to have to think about what that meant. There were not going to be any pictures without it.” – Annie Leibovitz
“One doesn’t stop seeing. One doesn’t stop framing. It doesn’t turn off and turn on. It’s on all the time.” – Annie Leibovitz
“I’ve said about a million times that the best thing a young photographer can do is to stay close to home. Start with your friends and family, the people who will put up with you. Discover what it means to be close to your work, to be intimate with a subject. Measure the difference between that and working with someone you don’t know as much about. Of course there are many good photographs that have nothing to do with staying close to home, and I guess what I’m really saying is that you should take pictures of something that has meaning for you…” – Annie Leibovitz
“My early childhood equipped me really well for my portrait work: The quick encounter, where you are not going to know the subject for very long. These days I am much more comfortable with the fifteen minute relationship, than I am with a life long relationship.” – Annie Leibovitz
“When you are on assignment, film is the least expensive thing in a very practical sense. Your time, the person’s time, turns out to be the most valuable thing.” – Annie Leibovitz
“When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I’d like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.” – Annie Leibovitz
“A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.” – Annie Leibovitz
“Sometimes I enjoy just photographing the surface because I think it can be as revealing as going to the heart of the matter.” – Annie Leibovitz
“In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what’s going on, but it’s representative.” – Annie Leibovitz
“Coming tight was boring to me, just the face… it didn’t have enough information.” – Annie Leibovitz
“The camera makes you forget you’re there. It’s not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.” – Annie Leibovitz
“When I take a picture I take 10 percent of what I see.” – Annie Leibovitz
“I think self-portraits are very difficult. I’ve always seen mine as straightforward, very stripped down, hair pulled back. No shirt. Whatever light happened to be available. I’d want it to be very graphic – about darkness and light. No one else should be there, but I’m scared to do it by myself. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. The whole idea of a self-portrait is strange. I’m so strongly linked to how I see through the camera that to get to the other side of it would be difficult. It would be as if I were taking a photograph in the dark.” – Annie Leibovitz
“Photography’s like this baby that needs to be fed all the time. It’s always hungry. It needs to be read to, taken care of. I had to nourish my work with different approaches. One of the reasons that I went to Vanity Fair was that I knew I would have a broader range of subjects – writers, dancers, artists and musicians of all kinds. And I wanted to learn about glamour. I admire the work of photographers like Beaton, Penn, and Avedon, as much as I respected grittier photographers such as Robert Frank. But in the same way that I’d had to find my own way of reportage, I had to find my own form of glamour.” – Annie Leibovitz
“When I started to be published I thought about Margaret Bourke-White and the whole journalistic approach to things. I believed I was supposed to catch life going by me – that I wasn’t to alter it or tamper with it – that I was just to watch what was going on and report it as best I could. This shoot with John was different. I got involved, and I realized that you can’t help but be touched by what goes on in front of you. I no longer believe that there is such a thing as objectivity. Everyone has a point of view. Some people call it style, but what we’re really talking about is the guts of a photograph. When you trust your point of view, that’s when you start taking pictures.” – Annie Leibovitz
“You don’t have to sort of enhance reality. There is nothing stranger than truth.” – Annie Leibovitz
“What I am interested in now is the landscape. Pictures without people. I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually there are no people in my pictures. It is so emotional.” – Annie Leibovitz
“Nature is so powerful, so strong. Capturing its essence is not easy – your work becomes a dance with light and the weather. It takes you to a place within yourself.” – Annie Leibovitz
“I wish that all of nature’s magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed.” – Annie Leibovitz
“I’d like to think that the actions we take today will allow others in the future to discover the wonders of landscapes we helped protect but never had the chance to enjoy ourselves.” – Annie Leibovitz
“My hope is that we continue to nurture the places that we love, but that we also look outside our immediate worlds.” – Annie Leibovitz
“There are still so many places on our planet that remain unexplored. I’d love to one day peel back the mystery and understand them.” – Annie Leibovitz
“I feel a responsibility to my backyard. I want it to be taken care of and protected.” – Annie Leibovitz
“I am impressed with what happens when someone stays in the same place and you took the same picture over and over and it would be different, every single frame.” – Annie Leibovitz
“If it makes you cry, it goes in the show.” – Annie Leibovitz
“I’ve always cared more about taking pictures than about the art market”. – Annie Leibovitz
“A very subtle difference can make the picture or not.” – Annie Leibovitz
“I actually love talking about taking pictures, and I think that helps everyone.” – Annie Leibovitz
Read more Photographer’s Quotes here.
View Photographer’s Documentaries here.

Using Adobe Camera Raw As A Filter

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ACRFilter
Photoshop CC introduced a long-awaited feature that will change how you adjust your images, when you adjust your images and what you adjust your images with—the ability to use Camera Raw as a filter.
Since it was introduced, Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) has been the industry-standard tool for processing RAW files—the beginning of a digital photographer’s workflow before moving into Photoshop. Sometime later, ACR extended its functionality to other file types like JPEGs. Today, you can use its full power at any point in your workflow while working in Photoshop. This opens up many new possibilities.
Using the Adobe Camera Raw Filter is useful for noise reduction, detail enhancement, color adjustment, localized lens correction, creative distortion and even tone-mapping 32-bit HDR images. Go beyond the maximum setting of Clarity, with two ACR Filters. Set different white balances for different regions of an image. Apply Lens Correction distortions locally. Global, local, double and crossprocessing—the ACR Filter can do it all.
While the ACR Filter revises workflow, it doesn’t rewrite it completely. It’s still better to do the lion’s share of image adjustment during RAW conversion with ACR or Lightroom (both offer the same RAW conversion engine)—preferably as a Smart Object so you can easily change the settings or update the process version. For instance, you’ll get better shadow and highlight detail using ACR during conversion than you will using the ACR Filter after conversion.
So when would you use the Adobe Camera Raw Filter? When the ACR toolset does something Photoshop’s toolset doesn’t. Or, when the ACR Filter does a task more quickly and easily, without sacrificing quality or flexibility. To decide this, compare the two toolsets …
Read more at Digital Photo Pro.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops. 

One Thing Leads To Another – The Story Behind The Image

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Incubation II

Incubation II, 2013 – Puna de Atacama Desert, Argentina

With Incubation II, I got everything I wanted – and more.

I’ve been working on a line of thought for some time, planning to make a series to fully develop it. Make multiple exposures of the same subject from different angles and combine them seamlessly. It’s like Cubism without the artifacts. Show what’s hidden by one angle of view by combining many angles of view. Show many sides of the same object simultaneously. Show the background that an object hides. Make a visual experience that more powerfully presents the experience of moving around, in, and through a space.

Not knowing what I wanted to do ahead of time would have changed the way I made exposures. I would have selected angles that offered the best relationship between object and environment, often prioritizing one over the other if any compromises were necessary, instead of selecting the optimal angle for both in two or more exposures. I wouldn’t have made as many exposures nor would I have know which alternate exposures to make – and why. Despite my best plans, I never could have planned for this magnificent moment of light, where its shape, split by a crack, echoes the shapes of the two cracked halves of the rock below it.

On my first visit to Argentina’s Atacama Desert I was able to gather several exposures that once combined served as proof of concept. They results, not just for one image but for multiple images, were successful enough to show that this idea and approach had lasting value.

My initial concept didn’t work entirely as planned. I tried a solution that looked similar to double exposure and while I was (and still am) interested in the way this made the objects look like they were vibrating (a new idea), it was too busy and unclear for the effect I was looking for here. On impulse, while I was processing the images, I tried nesting the stones within themselves and it was immediately clear that this was a powerful new solution. The technique served more than a visual device. The psychological dimensions of the work were heightened. The work was challenging me to expand my vision.

Finishing the first few images brought both clarity and productivity while photographing the location for the second time. I was able to make many related images, aware of what was different and what was similar. I was even able to rephotograph several subjects. Now, in addition to single images displaying multiple angles of the same subject, multiple images in the series do the same. It’s surprising how different things look from different angles of view – sometimes they’re unrecognizable.

The questions arose “How many images will this solution hold for?” and “What other related solutions will I find?” One thing led to another. Along the way, duplication, reflection, and distortion were also used. So new questions were posed, “Is this one series or many?” and “Will one series title hold them all?” (The working title for the series is Incubation.)

I’m not sure all of these images belong in the same series. While they’re all from the same location and they look similar stylistically and are related thematically, they also explore different ideas. Some are diverging significantly enough to make the case for placing them in several interconnected series. What’s the answer? Right now, it’s a mystery. I simply have to do more work to find out more about it.

I’ve found that the best plans are clear enough to stimulate productivity and flexible enough to evolve.

See related Contact Sheets from 2012 and 2013 here.

Questions
What are the benefits of working without a plan?
What are the benefits of working with a plan?
How do you create a plan so that it is generative rather than restrictive?
What mindset do you need to approach plans with to maximize productivity and insight?
When should you abandon one plan in favor of another?

Read more The Stories Behind The Photographs here.

39 Quotes On Goals

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Here’s a selection of my favorite quotes on goals.
“There is one quality more important than “know-how” and we cannot accuse the United States of any undue amount of it. This is “know-what” by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be.” – Norbert Wiene
“I respect the man who knows distinctly what he wishes. The greater part of all mischief in the world arises from the fact that men do not sufficiently understand their own aims. They have undertaken to build a tower, and spend no more labor on the foundation than would be necessary to erect a hut.” John Wolfgang von Goethe
“Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.” – Japanese Proverb
“You can’t hit a target you cannot see, and you cannot see a target you do not have.” – Zig Ziglar
“If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time. ” – Zig Ziglar
“When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.” – Lucius Seneca
“If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.” Yogi Berra
“This one step – choosing a goal and sticking to it – changes everything.” – Scott Reed
“You must take action now that will move you towards your goals. Develop a sense of urgency in your life.” – H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
“Begin with the end in mind.” Stephen Covey
“If what you are doing is not moving you towards your goals, then it’s moving you away from your goals.” – Brian Tracy
“Goals are dreams with deadlines.” – Diana Scharf Hunt
“Goals help you channel your energy into action.” – Les Brown
“I don’t care how much power, brilliance or energy you have, if you don’t harness it and focus it on a specific target, and hold it there you’re never going to accomplish as much as your ability warrants.” – Zig Ziglar
“The shortest distance between two points assumes you know where you’re going.” – Robert Brault
“A straight path never leads anywhere except to the objective.” – Andre Gide
“The road leading to a goal does not separate you from the destination; it is essentially a part of it.” – Charles DeLint
“You must have long-range goals to keep you from being frustrated by short-range failures.” – Charles C. Noble
“Obstacles are what you see when you take your eyes off your goals.” – Anonymous
“We are kept from our goal not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal.” – Robert Brault
“When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.” – Confucius
“Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.” – Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
“One half of knowing what you want is knowing what you must give up before you get it.” – Sidney Howard
“Goals allow you to control the direction of change in your favor.” – Brian Tracy
“A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.” ― Bruce Lee
“Sometimes the path you’re on is not as important as the direction you’re heading.” – Kevin Smith
“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” ― Ernest Hemingway
“Establishing goals is all right if you don’t let them deprive you of interesting detours.” – Doug Larson
“Success is 10% inspiration, 90% last-minute changes.” – Anonymous
“Map out your future, but do it in pencil.” – Jon Bon Jovi
“Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live.” – John Dewey
“What keeps me going is goals.” – Muhammad Ali
“If you’re bored with life – you don’t get up every morning with a burning desire to do things – you don’t have enough goals.” – Lou Holtz
“People are not lazy. They simply have impotent goals – that is, goals that do not inspire them.” – Tony Robbins
“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.” – Henry David Thoreau
“Goals determine what you’re going to be.” – Julius Erving
“If you go to work on your goals, your goals will go to work on you. If you go to work on your plan, your plan will go to work on you. Whatever good things we build end up building us.” – Jim Rohn
“If you set goals and go after them with all the determination you can muster, your gifts will take you places that will amaze you.” – Les Brown
“Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.” – John Dewey
Find more Creativity Quotes here.
Read more quotes daily on Twitter and Facebook.

Photoshop CC – 1 Click 3D Printing

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“See Photoshop Product Manager, Stephen Nielson, demonstrate the powerful and exciting new 3D printing features in Photoshop CC. Visualize your 3D designs in the real world thanks to new support that allows you to easily create, refine, preview, and print your 3D designs directly to a locally connected 3D printer or online service.”
View more Photoshop Videos here.
Learn more in my Digital Photography and Digital Printing Workshops

Resurrect Shadow Detail In Your Photographs With the App InstaFlash

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“Are the shadows in many of your images so dark it’s hard to see detail in them? Would you like to see more detail in shadows without making highlights overly bright? Who doesn’t have this problem? There’s a quick and easy cure. Use InstaFlash to bring shadow detail out into the open.
Of all the flash simulation apps, InstaFlash can produce the strongest results and unlike many of its competitors it generates results that are surprisingly free of digital artifacts, like haloing …”
I consider InstaFlash a must have app.
Read the rest on The Huffington Post.