32 Quotes by Joe McNally

I slid down in the seat and began to weep. I wept for her, for me, but mostly because the siren call of my first big story with a yellow border around it was more powerful than the call of fatherhood.

Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.

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, snotty subjects, obnoxious handlers, wigged-out art directors, technical disasters, failures of the mind, body, and will, all the shouldas, couldas, and wouldas that befuddle our brains and creep into our dreams, always remember to make room to shoot what you love. It’s the only way to keep your heart beating as a photographer.

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.

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 a tie, then put on a tie, ’cause what you have to say is more important than not wearing a tie. He was right.

Unpredictability. Accidents. Not good when you’re engaging in, say, brain surgery, but when lighting...wonderful!

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 a strawberry sundae with sprinkles.

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 ring yourself!

Digital technology has thrown a closed shop wide open, and there are more people out there snapping away than ever before. Some of the pictures are bad, some of them are good, and many of them need some seasoning and direction.