The very best you can hope for is that as a photographer I get over my need to be completely objective and, instead, take the time to create a photograph that makes you see, and feel, the scene the way I saw it.

- David duChemin

Vision & Voice: Refining Your Vision in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (Voices That Matter)

Photographers are lousy editors.

- Maggie Sherwood

*I love this quote for several reasons, but mostly because I'm an editor by day and it makes me chuckle. I'm a word editor, not a photo editor, but her point is sound: almost all photographers are too precious with their work and loath to hit the delete key when it's obviously necessary. I'm a great word editor, and I'm a fairly good photo editor of other people's images, but like most photographers, I still struggle to cut and chew and carve my own work. If you can do that consistently as a photographer, you're miles ahead of the rest of us. I'm better than I used to be, and technology helps. Lightroom's great for the old "Out of sight, out of mind" Jedi mind trick where I can just reject willy-nilly, knowing full well the images are all still there should I need to go back but out of the way. 

No matter how sophisticated the camera, the photographer is still the one that makes the picture.

- Doug Bartlow

I have to be as much diplomat as a photographer. 

- Alfred Eisenstaedt

No photographer is as good as the simplest camera. 

- Edward Steichen

The job of the photographer, in my view, is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope. 

- Robert Adams

The hardest thing about being a photographer is, you have to take pictures.

- Doug Bartlow

In order to be a successful photographer, you must possess both vision and focus—neither of which have anything to do with your eyes.

- Kevin Russo

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

- Ansel Adams

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. Impression is not enough. Design, style, technique, these, too, are not enough. Art must reach further than impression or self-revelation. "Art," said Alfred Stieglitz, "is the affirmation of life. And life, or its eternal evidence is everywhere." Some photographers take reality as the sculptors take wood and stone and upon it impose the dominations of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and elevation. A true photograph need not be explained, nor can be contained in words. 

- Ansel Adams