Aaron Sussman Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

Walking is the exercise that needs no gym. It is the prescription without medicine, the weight control without diet, the cosmetic that is sold in no drugstore. It is the tranquilizer without a pill, the therapy without a psychoanalyst, the fountain of youth that is no legend. A walk is the vacation that does not cost a cent.

Aaron Sussman
Photography is more than a means of recording the obvious. It is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever, whether it be a face or a flower, a place or a thing, a day or a moment. The camera is a perfect companion. It makes no demands, imposes no obligations. It becomes your notebook and your reference library, your microscope and your telescope. It sees what you are too lazy or too careless to notice, and it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.

Aaron Sussman
Almost anything which makes you want to stop and look has the makings of a picture. It may be the representation of a person, a place, or an object. Whether it's a good picture or a bad one depends, of course, on what you do with it.

Aaron Sussman
Writers have written eloquently of the joys of walking, but the magic of walking is something more than pleasure. It is a true magic, a psychophysical alchemy, which transforms the body and the mind.

Aaron Sussman
Years ago, scientists were predicting the evolution of a race of men without legs, thanks to the automobile. Nowadays we know they were wrong. It is not our legs we are losing. It is our minds.

Aaron Sussman
No picture should have more than one subject. If it's tree you want to show, be sure that it doesn't unintentionally become landscape with heavy clouds and little barn plus tree. If it's dog you want to show, be sure it doesn't turn out to be two people talking, with dog on leash held by man.

Aaron Sussman
I know this may sound strange to some, but about the only positive thing one can say about filters is that the function of every filter is negative; it subtracts a part of the light, holds back certain of the rays in the rainbow of colors. All that a filter does is to convert a part of the object light to image shadow.

Aaron Sussman
The most important fact to remember about a filter is that it is exactly what its name indicates, a screen. It sifts light rays. This means that a filter adds absolutely nothing to a picture.

Aaron Sussman
The difference between a good and a poor picture of an interior is largely a matter of lighting.

Aaron Sussman
The secret of most successful pictures is simplicity — the shearing away of everything that does not help the mood or idea you're trying to convey.

Aaron Sussman
Don't worry about whether or not the picture is technically or artistically possible. After you've snapped a couple of dozen impossible shots you'll begin to recognize the possible ones on sight. The important thing is to get the practice, mentally and actually. In other words, the best way to learn to take pictures is to take them.

Aaron Sussman
Let your mind create the picture before the camera does. Learn to see every object around you as part of a picture.

Aaron Sussman
There are pictures everywhere. Can you learn to see them, or will you, like Peary's cook, be searching forever for a point of view?

Aaron Sussman
A curious thing about modern lenses, as Geoffrey Crawley points out in the British Journal of Photography, is that the closer we get to eliminating all aberrations in our lenses, the further away we get from the lens that makes a pleasing picture, because "residual aberrations" help make a photograph more life-like. Image quality includes detail and gradation. And the "perfect" lens (without soft gradation) may ruin our picture.

Aaron Sussman
The eye was the first lens, and it's still the best. The most perfect lens ever made is just a clumsy affair compared to the sensitive, self-adjusting, apochromatic zoom mechanism that functions as the eye.

Aaron Sussman
[Photography] is better than memory, because it not only recalls things to our mind, but it enables us to show others, with absolute realism, what we have done, where we have been, what we have seen, even what we have thought. And it is more accurate than memory.

Aaron Sussman
Photography is a means of recording forever the things one sees for a moment.

Aaron Sussman
Photography [...] can be perfectly described by that sage French proverb: The more things change, the more they are the same. True, techniques have been improved; materials and equipment are better, faster, or easier to use. But the eye and heart of the photographer are still the same, and the simplest camera with ordinary film can still make great pictures if the artist sees clearly and presses the button at the decisive moment.

Aaron Sussman