quotables.

You gotta love a great quote. There are so many, though. It can be tough to stomach them if you read or learn too many at once. So rather than present you with a gazillion of my favorite quotes, I'll provide a few absolute classics. I'll start with two from Ed Land.

For those who don't know, Edwin Land was one of the most significant people of the 20th century. You'll believe me when I give you this subtle hint:

Polaroid.

He is the genius behind the most significant technology in photographic history. It was the first instant film--something we absolutely take for granted today. The reason I'm telling you all this is because Polaroid will officially cease all instant-film manufacturing as of 2009. To learn a bit more about how very important Polaroid was to a generation, read this article by Harry McCracken--complete with classic Polaroid ads.

Anyway, I love these two quotes by Ed himself:

"Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess."
- Edwin H. Land

"Every creative act is a sudden cessation of stupidity"
- Edwin H. Land

I'll give you two more. These are my undisputed favorite quotes of all time. I don't know if you have the patience for me to explain why, so I will just give you the quotes and let you wonder. They are highly relevant to my loves of Land and Light:

"I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude."
—Henry David Thoreau

Please give this last one your time.

"It was one of those mornings when the sunlight is burnished by a keen wind and long feathers of cloud move in a lofty sky. The silver light turned every blade of grass and every particle of sand into a luminous metallic splendor; there was nothing, however small, that did not clash in the bright wind, that did not send arrows of light through the glassy air. I was suddenly arrested in the long crunching path up the ridge by an exceedingly pointed awareness of the light. The moment I paused, the full impact of the mood was upon me. I saw more clearly than I have ever seen—before or since—the minute detail of the grasses, the clusters of sand shifting in the wind, the small flotsam of the forest, the motion of the high clouds streaming above the peaks. There are no words to convey the moods of these moments."
—Ansel Adams.

There are no words, Ansel — but you gave it a hell of a go. Thank you for spending your entire life trying to convey those very feelings in your iconic work; for shoving all that feeling and all that emotion into the lens of a camera and pulling it out of the fixer—the equivalent of what you saw and felt; thank you for your passion, which perpetually inspires my own.

wes.