Joe McNally Quotes

21 quotes in 389 categories

• No matter how much crap you gotta plow through to stay alive as a photographer, no matter how many bad assignments, bad days, bad clients,…
• We make pictures. At the end of the day, we create something potentially significant that did not exist at the beginning of the day. We…
• When shooting a story about someone, their hands should always be on your list to shoot.
• The camera’s not a camera, really. It’s an open door we need to walk through. It’s up to us to keep moving our feet.
• To me, pictures are about memory.
• Seán Manchester is, unsurprisingly, very well read in both classical and more recent sources on vampires and vampirism, and cites them with great authority while…
• Always remember to make room to shoot what you love. It's the only way to keep your heart beating as a photographer.
• If you're not having fun, your pictures will reflect that.
• The most important piece of equipment in your bag is your attitude
• Our pictures are our footprints. It’s the best way to tell people we were here.
• Do not be afraid of mistakes. They will be with you always,every time you put a camera to your eye. [If you] shoot safe, and…
• If you view your life as a piece of fabric or a tapestry, the photography is the stitching. It keeps everything together.
• Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.
• A professor I had in college used to tell me that if someone won’t listen to what you have to say because you’re not wearing…
• You’ve gotta taste the light, like my friend and fellow shooter Chip Maury says. And when you see light like this, trust me, it’s like…
• Unpredictability. Accidents. Not good when you’re engaging in, say, brain surgery, but when lighting...wonderful!
• John Loengard, the picture editor at Life, always used to tell me, ”If you want something to look interesting, don’t light all of it.
• Photography used to be not for the faint of heart. Its rigors would weed out the not-so-committed pretty quickly. You had to crank the f-stop…
• Technology has eliminated the basement darkroom and the whole notion of photography as an intense labor of love for obsessives and replaced them with a…
• Ansel Adams rattled around the Southwest with his battered truck and his view camera, which looked like a giant accordion with a lens attached to…

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