Has anyone ever summed up the PDML better than Bill Robb above? I think not. What's more, his statement applies even more to this, the annual compilation of PDML quotations and quips, jokes and jibes, insight and inspiration, neologisms and non-sequiturs.

This year I've further relaxed my already-low standards of accuracy by adopting those the movie industry uses when quoting film reviews in advertising: Gratuitous use of italic and boldface type where it did not exist in the original, generous addition of exclamation marks completely unknown to the original authors and... Actually, I've been doing all those things from the very beginning, expecting someone to get angry, or at least notice, eventually. It hasn't happened yet so I'm blowing my own cover, hoping to cause outrage, disappointment and any other other emotion sufficient to start a flame war... and therby create a new batch of memorable quotations. Pure evil: Just one more service we offer.

As a break from tradition, I'm posting this list on Christmas (or, as we heathens like to call it, "4 days after the winter solstice") because the beginning of the annual PDML Book project means I have enough to do starting New Year's Day. Also, U.S. Airways just cancelled my flight and I have nothing else to do today.

Getting back to tradition, I have as usual included one quotation from someone completely unassociated with The List, simply because I like it and I think it's applicable to photography. I get to do this because of the extraordinarily conscientious way I handle the awesome responsibility of compiling this list — right? You can find it for yourself, but it's not What the Duck (quotation #11). Although I have no evidence to support this assertion I'm confident The Duck is on the PDML. How could he not be?

We who are about to post salute you.

— Steve Desjardins

It takes more than a bearded man with antlers to give me nightmares. Not much more, mind....

— Brian Walters

YAY for shenanigans!

— Dave Savage

Technically speaking, the way we all feel about the PDML is called 'Stockholm Syndrome'.

— Bob Walkden

Can I suggest that you show us next the very best shot from the trip? That way, I will have only one lot of shouting at the monitor to do.

— Mike Wilson

Taken with a Pentax mind if not a Pentax camera.

— John Sessoms

Colors are a tad off (my spell checker suggests toad).

— Tim Øsleby

I am suprised at your apparent lack of familiarity with camera manuals. Usefulness is, emphatically, not one of their design features.

— Mike Wilson

Just another snapshotty celebration of the superficial.

— Doug Brewer

I'd want the fastest lens available/affordable, because just when you think your lens is fast enough, it's not.

— Tom Cakalic

Let's all take a moment to lower our standards.

— What the Duck (www.whattheduck.net/sites/default/files/WTD38.gif)

My mojo must be broken.

— Mike Wilson

Level horizons are over-rated.

— Frank Theriault

You know, I'm really going to have to stop drinking if I want to make a photograph sharp and in focus like yours.

— Christine Aguila

Is that Jane Bown's illumitran?

— Doug Brewer

I'd be leery of any man who says he understands women. He's liable to lie to you about important things as well.

— John Sessoms

I haven't met a red wine that doesn't compliment Peanut Butter Cups.

— Bill Robb

The only way we'll resolve this is at a beer summit.

— Frank Theriault

Film is that coating of fungi that grow on the outside of unused DSLR's.

— Stan Halpin

Please explain how you did it so that I can steal it.

— Larry Colen

How closely photography approximates real life tonal values shouldn't always be the basis on which the work is judged.

— Paul Stenquist

Explain to me who 'Theriault' is/was.

— Miserere

That was rather like being savaged by an exceptionally fluffy and sweet-natured lamb.

— Mike Wilson

Behold the weakness of adjectives!

— Graydon

Most of my post processing these days boils down to using the 'delete' key a lot.

— Doug Franklin

I understand the whole heuristic, holistic, para-mathematical paralysis feeling.

— Graydon

The bar smelt like a sewer, the lighting was consistently dodgy, they paid the musos peanuts and the loos were an ongoing science experiment. But the vibe was cool.

— Derby Chang

I wish I smoked so I could give up and use the money to buy the camera.

— Bob Walkden

I heard the occasional gunfire, but no banjos.

— Jostein Øksne

I'm a sucker for Pentax B&W when the ISO gets high.

— Miserere

I have never seen a site with more useless junk. Bookmarked it immediately, of course.

— Dave Brooks

Hey, this is my fantasy. Get your own.

— Doug Brewer

Don't think about these things, just photograph them and enjoy the mystery!

— Bob Walkden

I always do the one exposure thing, after deleting 50 bad ones.

— Dave Brooks

I spray all of my lenses with Rhino Coat and then take pictures with a P&S.

— Steve Desjardins

There's no reason why photography shouldn't be an art medium like oil paint, paper mache or elephant dung. There's nothing sacred about it.

— Bob Walkden

The price has gone up because I'm considering buying one.

— Brian Walters

You can bitch and whine on the Internet if that is what floats your boat, but it isn't as constructive.

— Bill Robb

Where else can you get this combination of technical expertise, visual delights, unquenchable whining, and the sheer frequency of pun-hijacked threads?

— Steve Desjardins

The hardest thing was getting the turkey poop stains out of the concrete.

— Marnie AKA Doe

A filmmaker who prefers ideas to images will never advance above the second rank because he is fighting the nature of his art. ...images are best when they are free to evoke many associations and are not linked to narrowly defined purposes.

— Roger Ebert (The non-PDML quotation for this year)

Yeah, I'm the kind of guy that scares sales reps.

— John Celio

Such optimism should not go unpunished.

— Steve Desjardins

I try to tailor my kit to what I think I'll be photographing. Of course I'm always wrong.

— Steve Sharpe

We're not the general public, we're the PDML.

— Bob Walkden

I probably spend waaaay too much time photographing dragonflies, but what else is there to do?

— Mark Cassino

Erotic is using a feather, kinky is using the whole puffin?

— Graydon

I'm either really lucky or else I have very low standards.

— Bill Robb

I gotta have a bottom line somewhere.

— Godfrey DiGiorgi

Pretty. In a noxious weed kinda' way.

— Dave Savage

From the GASP (Gimme Another Stunning Picture) series!

— Dario Bonazza

I have no money to spend on glass, but it's fun to think about.

— Larry Colen

Shooting flowers in the front yard, I care about DoF and critical focus. Shooting race cars a few feet away from me, I just try not to get killed.

— Doug Franklin

I have, on occasion, come up with what might generously be described as a solution in search of a problem. Every so often, I luck out and find the problem.

— Larry Colen

I don't know if it made my pictures any better, but I sure liked them more.

— Scott Loveless

We'll be doing much the same thing in 20 years as we are doing now. We'll probably just be doing it faster.

— Bill Robb

If it's the only one it has to be the favorite.

— Doug Brewer

The past several months I've been trying to figure out who I am as a photographer. Turns out there wasn't anything really to figure out, just took me a while to figure that out.

— Nick Wright

Quality in tools can translate to quality in photographs when one of the tools is the photographer's eye.

— César Matamoros

I like it. Gritty, slimey, I can almost smell it from here.

— Frank Theriault

Being a good photographer is part — but just part — of being a professional photographer.

— Luiz Felipe

Just a wild guess here, but you may be over-thinking this just a hair.

— Doug Brewer

What's your aim: Reality or beauty?

— Frank Theriault

Our conversation was exclusively looks and eyebrow movements.

— Mike Wilson

Oh NOOOOOOO!!! Something's wrong on the Internet!

— Bill Robb

If you haven't heard any good rumors lately, start one yourself.

— John Sessoms

This is a collectors item, but could actually be used for photography as well.

— Stan Halpin

Holy shit, guys, I'm just taking fuckin' pictures, you know?

— Frank Theriault

If I had access to a naked lady gymnast, I wouldn't be wasting my time photographing ferris wheels.

— Larry Colen

Thank you all for your input. I'm more frightened than ever.

— John Celio

Screw that. Hire a street urchin every day and have him carry your backpack. Bring all your lenses.

— Scott Loveless

I'm saving my good stuff for the end of the year anyway. Just like they do for the Oscars.

— Frank Theriault

I mean, it really has to have the whole navel-gazing, angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin, dear-me-what-does-art/truth/perception/intent/life-mean thread in front of it in order to feel the full impact, doesn't it?

— Frank Theriault

That picture does not suck. It must be the lens.

— Larry Colen

These kinds of sophomoric discussions make my brain run out through my nostrils.

— Bill Robb

It's a damn cool shot, and worth every second it took to polish.

— Dave Savage

I think no photo is either honest or dishonest. Only a photographer can have such virtues.

— Jostein Øksne

Bleepity bleep with bleep on top.

— Adam Montoya

I have now officially suffered for the Arts.

— Thrainn Vigfusson

Thanks for sharing. But I still hate you.

— Stan Halpin

I like the way you've balanced the small orange rock in the upper left hand edge with the right foot of the idiot with the uncontrolled highlight up his ass.

— Joseph McAllister

You survived and the bride liked the work. Treat it as the victory it is.

— Bill Robb

I've almost stopped blaming my tools.

— Tim Øsleby

This kinda thing is not my forte so please be gentle.

— Dave Savage

Anything's possible if you throw money at it.

— Cotty

Sorry, I've never been a man of my word when it involves shutting up.

— Bill Robb

That's 5 controls. Everything else is froth.

— Bob Walkden

I blame coffee, beer and motorcycles.

— Marnie aka Doe

There are enough gods, goddesses and sects to satisfy all possible political and cultural needs.

— Subash Jeyan

I lust for your camera.

— Frank Theriault

The Depth of Field is anything in an image that is not Bokeh!

— Joseph McAllister

Warning: If you don't like pictures that are mostly white, you won't like this.

— Tim Bray

...you get to met some really nice people, and Doug Brewer.

— Dave Brooks

I also don't have any appetite for the bottomless 'life-is-horrible-and-these-B&W-prints-prove-it' genre.

— Rick Womer

We have two other photographers, one uses a tripod, one doesn't. One person's work always needs to be rotated slightly in post production to make his pictures look straight. You wanna guess which one?

— Bill Robb

Charging a shit pile of money doesn't mean you aren't a fuck-up, it just means you are a good wanker.

— Bill Robb

That's why you need a cat.

— Frank Theriault

I believe in clubs for photographers, but only if every other form of persuasion fails.

— Bruce Walker

When shooting digital, I shoot only RAW and go for the good histogram. It doesn't get any better than that no matter how many meters one might use.

— Paul Stenquist

Using slide film I'd go for incident light readings, trying to evaluate the shadow/highlight ratios, and then consult my astral adviser, usually through some hours of meditation, then multiplied the readings by the square root of 1, then bracketed like hell.

— Luiz Felipe

Here are some of the pixels I assembled on a sensitive surface last year.

— Bob Walkden

Frank warned me about Mark and Cotty, but I didn't get the memo about you!

— Tony M

Shot at f/16, which is the Aperture of the Indecisive.

— Rick Womer

Editing is one of the best ways to produce great images.

— Ken Waller

Started as a hobby in teenage years, then I made the terrible mistake of turning it into a profession.

— Ralf Radermacher

Careful, or I might start thinking too highly of myself, which always leads to disaster.

— Doug Brewer

I hate it when someone takes a 'test photo' that blows my shit out of the water!

— Frank Theriault

Apparently, my banana is in the same boat of yours. Let's hope they'll both have a safe cruise.

— Dario Bonazza

Heavy lenses are like condoms: They're only good if you actually use them.

— Steve Desjardins

If you don't like it, it's 'cliche'. If you like it, it's 'genre'.

— Frank Theriault

What I miss about the film days has nothing to do with film.

— Dario Bonazza

I can categorically state that this is the first time that my private parts and cormorants have been mentioned in the same thread.

— Frank Theriault

I like to keep a couple of cormorants in my camera bag — they're just the thing to liven up an otherwise dull scene.

— Bob Walkden

Well, they're icicles, and they hang there. I just kind of shot them — I certainly didn't bring much creative vision to the exercise, but if you like icicles, here they are.

— Christine Aguila

My view may be biased, but it's mine, and I'm stickin' with it.

— Joseph McAllister

I suppose you're right, best just to shut up and let the photo do the talking.

— Frank Theriault

If we all had the same taste we'd only need one photographer.

— Anthony Farr

Hey Ralf, isn't it time for a bad image, just for a change?

— Luiz Felipe

The K20 buffer is large enough that, unless you are a tail gunner, you probably won't fill the buffer no matter which card you use.

— Bill Robb

Anyone who could have an affair with Ingrid Bergman is okay with me.

— Frank Theriault

We are far from a situation where all the nutters in the world have yet to be accounted for.

— Mike Wilson

Only funny & witty comments of the Bob W kind welcome.

— Christine Aguila

This is an experiment to see if I am no longer like the voice of someone crying in the wilderness, weeping for her lost PDMLwords.

— Tim Bray

There ain't never enough baby photos.

— John Sessoms

I'd go for the implants now.

— Jostein Øksne

Heck with the camera! What do you want for the monkey?

— John Graves

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