25 Great Quotes On Technique

Quotes_Technique
Enjoy this collection of quotes on Technique.
“You can practice shooting eight hours a day, but if your technique is wrong, then all you become is very good at shooting the wrong way. Get the fundamentals down and the level of everything you do will rise.” – Michael Jordan
“Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.” Leonard Bernstein
“I’m really very concerned with helping to create an attitude of freedom and daring toward the craft of photography.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“With practice the craft will come almost of itself, in spite of you and all the more easily if you think of something besides technique.” – Paul Gauguin
“The value of music is not dazzling yourself and others with technique.” – Herbie Hancock
“Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.” – Martha Graham
“You can’t learn techniques and then try to become a painter. Techniques are a result.” – Jackson Pollock
“It doesn’t make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.” – Jackson Pollock
“Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.” Oscar Wilde
“Tools and techniques ought to be an extension of consciousness, but they can just as easily be a protection from consciousness. Then the tools become defence mechanisms… against the unconscious.” – Rollo May
“Some of my photographs have always been a mystery to me in terms of how I arrived at them. Even with the technical ability to produce fine prints, I am hard put to know how it happens, yet unless technique and materials are seriously investigated and experienced, I see that moving statements are seldom made. The process of photography ever invites me. I hope never to lose this feeling. At times I make photographs for the sheer magic of its process, and the good feeling about the very stuff needed: light, chemical combinations, some imperceptible forces at work behind the scene. I am part of the drama which takes the guise of photography.” – Paul Caponigro
“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
“It is rather amusing, this tendency of the wise to regard a print which has been locally manipulated as irrational photography – this tendency which finds an esthetic tone of expression in the word faked. A MANIPULATED print may be not a photograph. The personal intervention between the action of the light and the print itself may be a blemish on the purity of photography. But, whether this intervention consists merely of marking, shading and tinting in a direct print, or of stippling, painting and scratching on the negative, or of using glycerine, brush and mop on a print, faking has set in, and the results must always depend upon the photographer, upon his personality, his technical ability and his feeling. BUT long before this stage of conscious manipulation has been begun, faking has already set in. In the very beginning, when the operator controls and regulates his time of exposure, when in dark-room the developer is mixed for detail, breadth, flatness or contrast, faking has been resorted to. In fact, every photograph is a fake from start to finish, a purely impersonal, unmanipulated photograph being practically impossible. When all is said, it still remains entirely a matter of degree and ability.” – Edward Steichen
“Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult. It is easy because its technical rudiments can readily be mastered by anyone with a few simple instructions. It is difficult because, while while the artist working in any other medium begins with a blank surface and gradually brings his conception into being, the photographer is the only image maker who begins with the picture completed. His emotions, his knowledge, and his native talent are brought into focus and fixed beyond recall the moment the shutter of his camera has closed.” – Edward Steichen
“Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality. It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term-selectivity.’ – Berenice Abbott
“All the technique in the world doesn’t compensate for the inability to notice.” – Elliott Erwitt
“Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask ‘how’, while others of a more curious nature will ask ‘why’. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.” – Man Ray
“Technique is noticed most markedly in the case of those who have not mastered it.” – Leon Trotsky
“The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all.” – Pablo Casals
“The more technique you have, the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is, the less there is.” –
Pablo Picasso
“Technique is what you fall back on when you run out of inspiration.” – Rudolf Nureyev
“Remember… you are expressing the technique, not doing the technique.” – Bruce Lee
“And there is a time where you can be beyond yourself. You can be better than your technique. You can be better than most of your usual ideas. And this is a whole other category that you can get into.” – Dave Brubeck
“Art is technique: a means by which to materialize the invisible realm of the mind.” — Hiroshi Sugimoto
“Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.” – Benjamin Cardozo
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20 Great Quotes On Craft

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Enjoy this collection of quotes on Craft.
“He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”
― Francis of Assisi
“There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.” – Emile Zola
“Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.” – Johannes Brahms
“Well you can’t teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.” – David Hockney
“The difference between an artist and a craftsman is that a craftsman is interested in his or her tools and an artist disdains them.” – Richard Benson
“Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.” – Raymond Chandler
“The moment a man begins to talk about technique that’s proof that he is fresh out of ideas.” – Raymond Chandler
“Art that submits to orthodoxy, to even the soundest doctrines, but lacks imagination and deep self-expression is lost leaving only the craftsmanship.” – Andre Gide
“The most awkward means are adequate to the communication of authentic experience, and the finest words no compensation for lack of it. It is for this reason that we are moved by the true Primitives and that the most accomplished art craftsmanship leaves us cold.” – Ananda Coomaraswamy
“It is not enough to know your craft – you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more.” – Edouard Manet
“I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don’t think they’re doing art but are merely practicing a craft and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them.” – Douglas Adams
“From an acting standpoint, when I was a kid, I thought I knew everything there was to know. As the years go by, this craft becomes more intensive as I get older. You realize how much more there is to know and to learn, and how much better you can get, if you really work at it.” – Kevin Bacon
“And if you can find out something about the laws of your own growth and vision as well as those of photography you may be able to relate the two, create an object that has a life of its own, which transcends craftsmanship. That is a long road, and because it must be your own road nobody can teach it to you or find it for you. There are no shortcuts, no rules.” – Paul Strand
“What I’ve learned over the years is that the craft of songwriting is trying to take the personal and make it universal – or in the case of telling a story, taking the universal and making it personal.” – Neil Peart
“The great thing for me, now, is that writing has become more and more interesting. Not just as a craft but as a way into things that are not described. It’s a thing of discovering. That’s when writing is really working. You’re on the trail of something, and you don’t quite know what it is.” – Sam Shepard
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” – Ernest Hemingway
“The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps… so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.” – Dylan Thomas
“You want to be a bit compulsive in your art or craft or whatever you do.” – Steve Martin
“You either create something and you keep it a secret and you die with it, or you can benefit the craft.” -Vidal Sassoon
“The life so short, the craft so long to learn.” – Hippocrates
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66 Great Quotes On Risk

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Enjoy this collection of quotes on Risk.
“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.” ― William Faulkner
“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” — Andre Gide
“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” – T. S. Eliot
“So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?” ― Hunter S. Thompson
“A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are for.” – John A. Shedd
“I believe that one of life’s greatest risks is never daring to risk.” – Oprah Winfrey
“The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” – Mark Zuckerberg
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The Top 20 Photography Books That Influenced Me

Influential Books of John Paul Caponigro

“Enjoy this collection of photographic books that have influenced me during some of my most formative years.

 

Megaliths by Paul Caponigro

#1

Paul Caponigro – Megaliths

Watching the production of this project from start to finish had a profound effect on me. The book was the culmination of decades of work on so many levels.

Alfred Stieglitz

#2

Alfred Stieglitz – Portrait Of Georgia O’Keefe

These portraits and nudes set the highest standards for me. Deep complex emotional connection. The variety of Stieglitz’ printing was eye opening. Meeting O’Keefe was interesting; I still wonder what it was like for her as an older woman to produce a book on her younger self.

Eliot Porter's Nature's Chaos

#3

Eliot Porter – Nature’s Chaos

Fortunate to see my mother design many of Porter’s books, this one confirmed my feeling that he saw a deeper order in nature before we more fully understood complexity in the sciences.

Christopher Burkett's Intimations Of Paradise

#4

Christopher Burkett – Intimations Of Paradise

Formerly a Gnostic monk, Burkett renounced his vows of poverty so that he could afford film and continue to faithfully transcribe The Book Of Nature. There are so many ways to live life in a sacred way

Dune / Edward Weston And Brett Weston

#5

Edward & Brett Weston – Dune

Dune / Edward Weston And Brett Weston collects works, many never before printed, by father and son showing how similar and how different each artist’s vision was. Working with Kurt Markus to produce this book was eye-opening.

Ansel Adams / The Making Of 40 Photographs

#6

Ansel Adams – The Making Of 40 Photographs

It’s wonderful to read how an artist works and even better to see them in action; I was lucky to do both. I do wish Adams wrote more about why he made each image and what it meant to him.

Jerry Uelsmann's Process & Perception

#7

Jerry Uelsmann – Process & Perception

It demonstrates how process changes perception – and the process you engage is a personal choice. The inside is just as important as the outside.

Edward Burtynsky's Manufactured Landscapes

#7

Edward Burtynsky – Manufactured Landscapes

While Eliot Porter didn’t want to beautify trash through art Burtynsky turns an unflinching eye towards industrial impacts on land crafting a complex statement on land use and ultimately identity.

Minor White Manifestations Of The Spirit

#8

Minor White – Manifestations Of The Spirit

No other photographer is as articulate about the inner experience of making art. His essay on equivalence is seminal.

Wynn Bullock's Revelations

#9

Wynn Bullock – Revelations

Bullock’s marriage of science/physics and art
became as much a philosophical statement as a celebration of beauty.

Kenro Izu's Sacred Places

#10

Kenro Izu – Sacred Places

Izu tries to photograph the spirit of ancient sacred places. When he talks about atmosphere he means more than weather.

Chris Rainier's Keepers Of The Spirit

#11

Chris Rainier – Keepers Of The Spirit

If Edward Curtis met Joseph Campbell you’d get Rainier’s survey of spirituality in world cultures.

Sebastiao Salgado's An Uncertain Grace

#12

Sebastiao Salgado – An Uncertain Grace

Salgado sets the bar high by bringing out the dignity within his subjects no matter how undignified their circumstances.

oyce Tenneson's Transformations

#13

Joyce Tenneson – Transformations

Tenneson’s images remind me of what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

Arnold Newman's One Mind's Eye

#14

Arnold Newman – One Mind’s Eye

Beautifully constructed portraits from the father of environmental portraiture.

Harry Callahan

#15

Harry Callahan

The rest of his wrestlessly inventive work intrigued me but his deeply honest extended portrait of his wife set a standard I hope for in all others.

Sugimoto

#16

Sugimoto

It’s minimalism that isnt shallow or evasive; the collection reinforces the concept, creating a context for itself. It asks so many questions? Enough? Not enough? Do all the world’s oceans look the same? Or is it just one ocean? Is it the camera or the artist who makes them look the same? Is it the way we look? How is it that by looking at them long enough I begin to see myself?

 Richard Misrach's The Sky Book

#17

Richard Misrach – The Sky Book

Pleasant as it is this minimalism ordinarily wouldn’t be enough for me. But then he adds the titles of time and places in many languages with a history. Together they grow stronger and placed within his life work as one of many Desert Cantos they grow stringer still. Rebecca Solnit’s accompanying essay is excellent. I learned a lot from looking at this – about art and myself.

Witkin

#18

Witkin

I find Joel Peter Witkin’s work profoundly challenging. I can’t say I love it; I can’t say I hate it. I can say it continually crosses back and forth between self-indulgently expressing his individual perversions and courageously looking unflinchingly into a universal heart of darkness.

Michael Kenna's Night Work

#19

Michael Kenna – Night Work

Kenna’s elegant minimalism is laced with a quiet spirituality that comes less from tradition and more from being in the moment, growing most emotional when he’s in the dark.

Huntington Witherill's Orchestrating Icons

#20

Huntington Witherill – Orchestrating Icons

It’s musical for its flowing compositions and exquisite tonalities. Extraordinary separation in extreme highlights and shadows, no one prints quite like him in.

 

Find out more about my influences here.

28 Great Quotes On Mastery

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“Practice creates the master.” – Miguel Ruiz
“Energy and persistence conquer all things.” — Benjamin Franklin
“Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.” – Albert Einstein
“Mastering music is more than learning technical skills. Practicing is about quality, not quantity.”- Yo-Yo Ma
“Though you can love what you do not master, you cannot master what you do not love.” – Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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41 Great Quotes On Context

Quotes_Context
Enjoy this collection of quotes on Context.
“For me context is the key – from that comes the understanding of everything.” – Kenneth Noland
“Making mental connections is our most crucial learning tool, the essence of human intelligence; to forge links; to go beyond the given; to see patterns, relationships, context” – Marilyn Ferguson
“Critics have a responsibility to put things in a cultural and sociological or political context. That is important.” – Annette Bening
“What we have to do is put this in a coherent form for them at the end of the day, and on the big events, give them the kind of context that they deserve.” – Tom Brokaw
“I do not fear truth. I welcome it. But I wish all of my facts to be in their proper context.” – Gordon B. Hinckley
“Disinformation is most effective in a very narrow context.” – Frank Snepp
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44 Great Quotes On Talent

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Enjoy this collection of quotes on Talent.
“Talent is nothing but a prolonged period of attention and a shortened period of mental assimilation.” – Konstantin Stanislavsky
“I believe that every person is born with talent.” – Maya Angelou
“Talent is an accident of genes – and a responsibility.” – Alan Rickman
“Hide not your talents, they for use were made, What’s a sundial in the shade?” ― Benjamin Franklin
“Whether or not you discover your talents and passions is partly a matter of opportunity. If you’ve never been sailing, or picked up an instrument, or tried to teach or to write fiction, how would you know if you had a talent for these things?” – Ken Robinson
“Self-doubt kills talent.” – Edie McClurg
“Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won’t carry a quitter.” – Stephen King
“At first I wasn’t sure that I had the talent, but I did know I had a fear of failure, and that fear compelled me to fight off anything that might abet it.” – Gordon Parks
“The greatest talents often lie buried out of sight.” – Plautus
“This is how I define talent; it is a gift that God has given us in secret, which we reveal without knowing it.” – Montesquieu
“I built my talents on the shoulders of someone else’s talent.” – Michael Jordan
“The best way to get more talents is to improve the talents we have.” – Edward Bickersteth
“Some people possess talent, others are possessed by it. When that happens, a talent becomes a curse.” – Rod Serling
“Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.” – Carl Jung
“The real issue is not talent as an independent element, but talent in relationship to will, desire, and persistence. Talent without these things vanishes and even modest talent with those characteristics grows.” – Milton Glaser
“Ordinary people think that talent must be always on its own level and that it arises every morning like the sun, rested and refreshed, ready to draw from the same storehouse — always open, always full, always abundant — new treasures that it will heap up on those of the day before; such people are unaware that, as in the case of all mortal things, talent has its increase and decrease, and that independently of the career it takes, like everything that breathes… it undergoes all the accidents of health, of sickness, and of the dispositions of the soul — its gaiety or its sadness. As with our perishable flesh. talent is obliged constantly to keep guard over itself, to combat, and to keep perpetually on the alert amid the obstacles that witness the exercise of its singular power.” – Eugène Delacroix
“It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one’s nose, a good deal of it to know in which direction to point that organ.” – W. H. Auden
“One thing I’ve learned is that I’m not the owner of my talent; I’m the manager of it.” – Madonna Ciccone
“There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.” – Honore de Balzac
“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” – Stephen King
“Confidence is the most important single factor in this game, and no matter how great your natural talent, there is only one way to obtain and sustain it: work.” – Jack Nicklaus
“Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There’s plenty of movement, but you never know if it’s going to be forward, backwards, or sideways.” – H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
“Hard work pays off – hard work beats talent any day, but if you’re talented and work hard, it’s hard to be beat.” – Robert Griffin III
“Effort without talent is a depressing situation… but talent without effort is a tragedy.’ – Mike Ditka
“Men fail much oftener from want of perseverance than from want of talent.” – William Cobbett
“Talent alone won’t make you a success. Neither will being in the right place at the right time, unless you are ready. The most important question is: ‘Are your ready?’” – Johnny Carson
“We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.” – Eric Hoffer
“There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long, and the great charm of all power is modesty.” – Louisa May Alcott
“Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“Genius is talent set on fire by courage.” – Henry Van Dyke
“Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.” – Bernard Williams
“Talent does what it can; genius does what it must.” – Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
“Talent does whatever it wants to do. Genius does only what it can.” – Eugene Delacroix
“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
“Genius gives birth, talent delivers.” – Jack Kerouac
“Talent for talent’s sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.” – Erica Jong
“If a man has talent and can’t use it, he’s failed. If he uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he uses the whole of it, he has succeeded, and won a satisfaction and triumph few men ever know.” – Thomas Wolfe
“I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.” – J. K. Rowling
“When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left and could say, I used everything you gave me.” – Erma Bombeck
“Your talent is God’s gift to you; what you do with it is your gift to God.” – Leo Buscaglia
“Never confuse the size of your paycheck with the size of your talent.” – Marlon Brando
“Success is what you do with your ability. It’s how you use your talent.” – George Allen, Sr.
“One needs more than ambition and talent to make a success of anything, really. There must be love and a vocation.” – Jessye Norman
“A really great talent finds its happiness in execution.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“If you’ve got a talent, protect it.” – Jim Carrey
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25 Great Quotes On Visualization

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Enjoy this collection of quotes on visualization.
“Visualization is daydreaming with a purpose.” – Bo Bennett
“Visualization and belief in a pattern of reality activates the creative power of realization.” – A. L. Linall, Jr.
“Try out your ideas by visualizing them in action.” – David Seabury
“Visualize this thing that you want, see it, feel it, believe in it. Make your mental blue print, and begin to build.” – Robert Collier
“Having a mental snapshot of where you are, where you are going, and what you are moving toward is incredibly powerful.” – Sara Blakely
“The harder you work… and visualize something, the luckier you get.” – Seal
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9 Great Quotes On Being In Sync

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Enjoy this collection of quotes on being in sync.
“Tidal rhythms have an effect on our physiology…. When we feel out of sorts, our body is out of sync with the body of the Universe. Spending time near the ocean, or anywhere in nature, can help us to synchronize our rhythms with nature’s rhythms.” –
Deepak Chopra
“Sometimes you are in sync with the times, sometimes you are in advance, sometimes you are late.” – Bernardo Bertolucci
“Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within you.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
“When mind and action are separate, zen is lost. We keep the two in sync by paying attention.” – Philip Toshio Sudo
“There’s something about the rhythm of walking, how, after about an hour and a half, the mind and body can’t help getting in sync.” – Bjork
“Part of the joy of looking at art is getting in sync in some ways with the decision-making process that the artist used and the record that’s embedded in the work.” – Chuck Close
“It happens so quickly it seems like it’s coming from somewhere else. It’s not It just means that you’re in sync with yourself. And whatever your goal is, in terms of hearing a melody or a lyric, the closer you get to it, the faster it comes out and the easier it is to “spit it out”, as it were.” – Harry Nilsson
“Dream big, as long as you do it in sync with your truth, with your heart, your brain. And you are not hurting anybody, go ahead and do it.” – Angelique Kidjo
“I feel that all you can do is give it your absolute best with whatever gifts the universe has given you. And if you make it in some way that other people can recognize, that’s fine. But even if you don’t quote-unquote make it, you’re fine, if you’ve given it your whole heart and soul. You’re totally in sync with your purpose and with the universe. And that’s fine.” – Alice Walker
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