Quotes from Ansel Adams

In my mind's eye, I visualize how a particular... sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice.

There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.

It is just as important to bring people the evidence of the beauty of the world of nature and of man as it is to give them a document of ugliness, squalor, and despair.

I can look at a fine art photograph and sometimes I can hear music.

I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful - an endless prospect of magic and wonder.

Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.

Once destroyed, nature's beauty cannot be repurchased at any price

Today, we must realize that nature is revealed in the simplest meadow, wood lot, marsh, stream, or tidepool, as well as in the remote grandeur of our parks and wilderness areas.

The artist and the photographer seek the mysteries and the adventure of experience in nature.

Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real.

I believe photography is a tool to express our positive assessment of the world. A tool to acquire ultimate happiness and belief.

Bad weather makes for good photography.

It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.

The 'machine-gun' approach to photography – by which many negatives are made with the hope that one will be good – is fatal to serious results.

To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces and record the qualities of nature and humanity which live or are latent in all things.

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.

Sometimes I arrive just when God's ready to have somone click the shutter.

We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium.

This profession [photography] is deserving of attention and respect equal to that accorded painting, literature, music and architecture.

Ask yourself, 'Why am I seeing and feeling this? How am I growing? What am I learning?' Remember: Every coincidence is potentially meaningful.

I believe the approach of the artist and the approach of the environmentalist are fairly close in that both are, to a rather impressive degree, concerned with the affirmation of life.

A good photograph is knowing where to stand.

The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance.

Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment.