Do Not Echo Author with the_author()

Hello,
How can I not echo the Author with the_author()? I want to do something like:
if(the_author()=="author name") {
echo "<img src='somepath' />';
}

Whenever I use the aforementioned code it always echos the name of the author, and also correctly echos the image. But I don’t want it to echo the author name, just the image, how do I do this? In other words how do I pass the result of the function to PHP instead of passing and echoing?