He is the touchstone against which many of the most accomplished photographers in the world measure their color photography. He has been a brilliant, outspoken, pioneering photographer for more than 50 years, as well as one of the most sought-after lecturers and workshop instructors. For all those years he has captured his images with Nikons, from the original F he used in 1959 to take the photo of Miles Davis that appears on the cover of what is generally regarded as the finest jazz album ever recorded, Kind of Blue, to the D3 he carries today.

Nikon is proud to celebrate our continuing partnership with Jay Maisel.

Jay Maisel will tell you that there's not really much he can tell you about his photographs. He prefaced his recording of the audio section of our accompanying slideshow by saying, "There's not much to say...I saw what I saw and I took the pictures."

The key phrase is "what I saw."

The best way for you to appreciate what Jay sees is to first look at his photos, then listen in as he verbally sketches the world according to Jay.

And for that, we'll get out of the way.

Balance
"When I was a young photographer, an art director looked at my work and said, 'You walk too fast. You're all over the place, you're not waiting for things to happen.' I still walk too fast, but it was good for me to know what he meant—which was that I had to take the time to work a subject...and I had to have the patience to allow things to happen.

"When I'm shooting something for five minutes or an hour or however long I may take, and I get to the point where I feel that I finally have it, then that's the time for me to really dig in and work on it some more.

"The downside of doing all that shooting is that there is a line between spontaneity and reality. If I see something wonderful and take one shot of it, then I have spontaneity. But when I take a lot of shots to explore it fully and make sure that I've got it, at some point I've lost the spontaneity. That's reality."