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Keep taking photos when everyone else stops - Leibovitz was at the White House the day President Richard Nixon resigned from office in 1974. She said all the other White House press photographers had put down their cameras as the helicopter took off and they rolled up the red carpet, but she kept shooting and got that famous image.

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Meet deadlines and always be prepared - Leibovitz explained that, at the time of Nixon's resignation, Rolling Stone was waiting on infamous gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson to file a piece. When he never turned it in, the editors took Leibovitz's impressive photos and splashed them across the pages designated for Thompson, Racked reports.

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Don’t lose yourself in a subject - After working at Rolling Stone for 10 years, Leibovitz accepted a job from Mick Jagger to be the official tour photographer. She said it took her eight years (and a stint in rehab) to get off the tour, explaining that she had thought the best way to be a journalist and take photos was to become part of what you were doing. She’s since learned that’s wrong: "You don't want to lose yourself."

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Understand the potential of a conceptual photograph - After leaving The Rolling Stones, Leibovitz returned to shooting for magazines and started to develop her own style. Instead of plain portraits, she would create images laden with a pun-like meaning, like shooting Bette Midler in a bed of roses after she starred in the film 'The Rose.' “I was trying to address their poetry in their portrait, and suddenly, it just clicked. HA! That the set-up portrait could have a story to it," Leibovitz explained.

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Some shoots figure themselves out - Leibovitz famously photographed John Lennon and Yoko Ono the day the Beatles star was murdered, but the process of that iconic image making its way to the cover of Rolling Stone was not as planned. She was only meant to photograph Lennon, but he insisted Ono be in it. Then she wanted them both to be naked, but Ono wouldn’t take off her pants so Leibovitz told her to keep all her clothes on. After he was killed, Rolling Stone was going to put just a portrait of Lennon on the cover, but Leibovitz told them she’d promised him it’d be them both. The rest is history.

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Photographing people you’re intimate with - Leibovitz took many photos of her partner, the late essayist Susan Sontag. She explained that because she knew Sontag so well, it was hard to work with the way Sontag wanted to be portrayed, especially because her own idealistic idea of what her partner wanted to look like didn’t match with the reality of what Sontag wanted, which was to look good.

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Photographing people you’re intimate with - “That was heartbreaking to me," Leibovitz recounted. "I thought she'd want to be strong [looking] but she didn't want to be that. That happens when you know people very well, you know how they want to see themselves, and it can be very difficult."

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Incorporate your other interests - An amazing part of photography is that it can involve so many other realms, from politics and cinema to glamour and, in Leibovitz’s case, dance. She ended up spending three weeks in 1990 shooting dancers, including Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rob Besserer, because she’d grown up with dance, as her mother was a dancer. In bringing two of her passions together, she produced magic.

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But every photographer should work with dancers once - In her book 'Annie Leibovitz At Work,' she calls all dancers "a photographer's dream" because they're used to using their bodies to communicate, and they're trained to respond in collaborative situations.

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Don't shy away from pain - In moments of pain, it's natural to want to put the camera down as it seems almost respectful to keep these moments private. But Leibovitz challenged that notion, taking photos of both her father and Sontag dying from illness.

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Be productive, not exploitative - The reason, perhaps, these photos were not seen as disrespectful was because Leibovitz wasn't exploiting their illness, but rather creating from it, dealing with it like a true artist. She liked to compare those images of deterioration to photos of her daughters, contrasting life and death.

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Find personality even without people - While Leibovitz stuck with portrait photography most of her life, she did catalog abstract images as well. She explained that it was all about “trying to make sense of things, without people in the pictures. The personalities are there.”

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Spend time with your subject - Leibovitz is known for spending time with her subjects before shooting, sometimes all day, to find the right conversation and setting for a portrait.

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Give honesty to get honesty - When shooting American author Maurice Sendak for Vanity Fair in 2011, Leibovitz said they talked about dying all day and she was very honest right away, explaining that being forward and direct about things is so important, especially if you're looking for some honesty in your photos. "It's not awkward, it's stimulating."

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Responding to controversy - Many parents were not enthused to see 15-year-old wholesome Disney star Miley Cyrus covered with just a silk sheet on the front of Vanity Fair. Many believed the young star was coerced into doing it, and the Disney Channel was furious.

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Responding to controversy - Leibovitz said in a statement, "I'm sorry that my portrait of Miley has been misinterpreted," explaining that the two had sifted through fashion photographs together and discussed it before shooting, and that her family had approved. "The photograph is a simple, classic portrait, shot with very little makeup, and I think it is very beautiful."

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You have to be on all the time - Photography, to Leibovitz, is an inseparable part of life. She famously said, "One doesn't stop seeing. One doesn't stop framing. It doesn't turn off and turn on. It's on all the time."

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When you're starting out, stay close to home - For beginner photographers, Leibovitz advises you to “start with your friends and family, the people who will put up with you.” You have to discover what it means and how it feels to be intimate with your subject, then compare that to working with someone you don't know much about. While there are good photographs that come from not knowing a subject, her point is that you should photograph whatever has meaning for you.

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Be vulnerable - Leibovitz is often quoted for her rule of thumb: "If it makes you cry, it goes in the show." She's also admitted that, through her photos, she was never scared to fall in love with her subjects.

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Truth is more than enough - Many photographers seek out extraordinary lengths to produce an unusual, standout image, but over the years Leibovitz has learned that you don't have to try too hard to enhance reality, as "there is nothing stranger than truth."

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Listen to your subjects - In an interview with Ingrid Sischy published in 1992, Sischy asked Leibovitz about whether she thought being a woman was a factor in getting her subjects to relax. She replied that she knew having a non-threatening presence helped especially in the beginning, but that she mostly just empathized with her subjects and listened to their ideas. People often ask her how she got Sting to undress for a shoot in the desert, but she admitted it was his idea, and she went with it.

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Annie Leibovitz -

It needs to be fed, it's always hungry, and it needs to be read to and taken care of—which means finding new approaches. In Leibowitz's case, as she recounted to Sischy, she went to Vanity Fair to welcome a broader range of subjects (writers, dancers, artists, musicians, etc), and to learn about glamour photography.

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Forget any sense of objectivity - Having learned to be a journalistic photographer, it took that shoot with John Lennon for Leibovitz to step away from the notion of objectivity. “I no longer believe that there is such a thing as objectivity,” she told Sischy, insisting that everyone has a point of view, often called a style, but which is actually the guts of photography. “When you trust your point of view, that's when you start taking pictures.”

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Respect your camera - Lugging around camera equipment, and film as she used to have to do as well, is part of her job. In her book 'Annie Leibovitz At Work,' she recounted her first experience in learning to respect her very first camera by climbing Mt. Fuji with it. "If I was going to live with this thing, I was going to have to think about what that meant. There were not going to be any pictures without it."

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Don't try too hard - One of the greatest things about Leibovitz's approach is how simple she makes things. She doesn't try to overthink her concepts of people, and has found that "the stupider it is, the better it looks."

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Play with different techniques - One that Leibovitz favored earlier in her career was combining ambient light with a strobe, which allows the image to become almost one dimensional. It's essentially a short exposure for the foreground, and a long exposure for the background.

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What about photography in the modern day? - Jordan Wharf-Young of Something About magazine asked Leibovitz her advice for those trying to break into the industry today, and the photographer admitted it's a different time now—no one's going to give you assignments, you just have to go out, find a subject you care about, develop a substantial portfolio, and take your work to other people. Spending time on your own work first is crucial before working for other people.

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Do your homework - Before photographing Carla Bruni, the wife of Nicolas Sarkozy (then-president of France), she looked at pictures of the palace, of other people in the palace, of couples in love, of other photos of Bruni by other photographers, and more. Add to that her vast knowledge of photography's history, and she had a lot to work with.

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Know when to stop - Leibovitz didn't always know when to stop snapping, afraid that she would miss something. Eventually she learned that you should never exhaust the subject or the situation, and ultimately that "Photography is limited. It's an illustration of what's going on. Basically, you're never totally satisfied."

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Photography should be an extension of yourself -

Leibovitz never separated any part of her identity from photography, and is famously quoted, "When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I'd like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph."

See also: Stunning nature photographs that look like paintings

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