Quotes About Camera

The camera course was a bit crap. But when I was in drama school, I wasn't interested. I wanted to be a stage actress. I was not interested in learning camera craft. But then you throw yourself in the deep end when you do get a job in front of the camera because you have absolutely no idea what you're doing, and it is a skill.

The majority of my background is multi-camera format, which is very broad and a very arch perception of reality. Whereas single camera tends to be more truthful and a little more intimate of a medium. Friends was an education in intelligent comedic banter; in intelligent vernacular. It was an education in scene study. It was an education in group dynamic. I came out of there with a masters degree in comedy.

It was extremely useful to grow up in front of the camera. It gives the camera no significance. I think it helped me have perspective on things. The attraction that Hollywood can have, I feel like I'm over that. Instead I just concentrate on acting.

If you need to strap a camera to you or get in a small space, then it makes sense to use digital.I do think it is possible to use a digital camera artistically, but it can only be good if you are using film technique. Film has grain, and digital has pixels, and there is not that much of a difference, but digital does not replace the need to create a scene and light it properly and spend time considering the shot.

'How the West was Won' was very hard, because it was a three cameras technique, meaning three cameras wide. Therefore I wasn't speaking to my fellow performer, I was speaking to a camera, or a line next to the camera. It was difficult to do, because its not real acting. I had to pretend that I was 'seeing' Agnes Moorhead or Jimmy Stewart or Carroll Baker. I wasn't, I was acting to a drawn line. It took me personally two years to make the film, because my character starts at age 16 and I end up being 92 years old in the film. By the end of that production, I was ready for a long nap.

I'm into capturing the moment. Sometimes, I'll rip the camera out of my assistant's hands and he'll be shouting, But there's no film in the camera! and I think, Never mind! Let's go.

I built my own studio. I don't have the professional language to describe it because I'm not a videographer - but I'm a technician. So I get the camera, I get all the things that translate the camera to the computer, I set up a live session, I do the security on it, I set up a background so I can key it out, like newscasters do, and replace it with whatever I want - and I can be anywhere I need to be.

We have African-Americans and black people getting behind the scenes more and more, we get true black images in television and film...because we have black people behind them. They can tell stories from those points of view and bring to life those characters who have yet to be shown. As long as we have people behind the camera just as much as in front of the camera doing the work, then we'll always be good.

Most people assume because I'm an actor that's all I know about and care about, I'm actually a camera geek and a film geek. I grew up making short films the same time I was acting. For me, it's a motion picture, not a play. I'm just as interested in what the camera department is doing and world building through costume design and production design as I am in acting. I think all good directors do that whether they're an actor or not.

Screen work always boils down to that moment between the camera and the actor or the actors. It always boils down to that, ultimately. You serve the camera.

In case you haven't heard, my girlfriends and I have declared the summer of 2012 as the best summer ever. The best way to document said 'best summer ever' is with a good ol' disposable camera. Smile, click, move on! Nobody gets pic approval, and there's no time wasted gathering around the camera to analyze a moment that just happened.

I think that film is still an artform and it doesn't really matter if you're using a digital camera or a film camera.

I'm a film rat. I love being in front of a camera. I love being behind a camera. I love talking to the director. I love talking film.

I enjoyed being at Jurassic Park, with Jeff Goldblum and Sir Richard Attenborough. It's funny, because Steven Spielberg would actually operate the camera sometimes. He'd consider the camera, and he'd be kind of looking at me. He actually shot a few of the things that I'm in, in that lab, with that long ash dangling off that cigarette. Hogging that fake cigarette. Because I had quit smoking, and he wanted to make sure I didn't go back, so he got me the worst-tasting fake cigarettes ever.

Sexuality, eroticism and desire are important for all of us. But that is also the contradiction. How can we speak about pictures and, for example, say no to this way of representing a woman's body? It's also a camera-and-object problem, of who is really guiding the camera.

I don't like to put too much effort into things. I find that once you get involved with special effects it is no longer about what is happening in front of the camera and I really want to concentrate on what is happening in front of the camera, like the man apparently peeing on the surface of the screen.

I want my fellow citizens to wise up and stop falling for [war]. I try with my limited access, I'm not getting into Kabul with a camera, they're not letting me get into Benghazi with a camera. I do what I can with my flimsy American passport and a visa. The photos are a bit more heavy from Southern Sudan and Haiti and Cuba.

When you're acting in front of a camera, you can really give all of your emotions with your eyes so the camera can see it. When you're in voiceover, you can't do that at all. It's a lot tougher because you have to convey this emotion, and you have to have a lot of trust in the animators.

When you start using more expensive cameras, everything around it gets more expensive, which is something we hadn't necessarily taken into account beforehand. Your lighting package gets way more expensive, and then coloring it is going to be more expensive. So I think all of that will essentially be cushioning our camera package. Budgets beget budgets, and expenses beget expenses.

You can start a documentary with just a camera, as opposed to a fiction film where you need actors, a crew, a script, a lot more start-up resources. It may be self-perpetuating.

I spent every day just praying that I didn't look like a big dork on camera.

The work I enjoy is when the camera rolls, and I like the work in the moment.

The camera can move, you can make the shots, blah blah blah, but as long as the actors are good, you have something.

Men still control the news, both on and off camera.

When you grow up on camera and in the public eye, you feel you have to put forth this image. I just took that to the extreme and there was a lot of pressure on me

The documentary photographer aims his camera at the real world to record truthfulness. At the same time, he must strive for form, to devise effective ways of organizing and using the material. For content and form are interrelated. The problems presented by content and form must be so developed that the result is fundimentally [sic] true to the realities of life as we know it. The chief problem is to find a form that adequately represents the reality.

Improvisational things about picture-making... learned from working with the small camera early on have served me well in being able to think quickly when making [portraits].

You have to really think about what kind of guy the character is and decide on a style that works, that complements my physicality and that's going to be believable, but also be compelling for the audience and for the camera.

I don't want to disrespect hip-hop by being something I'm not. I'm Pooch Hall. My strength is in front the camera and holding dialogue.

The camera's perspective exactly matches that of the assassin: it now shoots the tourists shooting their own memorial photos, and we can watch this in real time.

Good acting is thinking in front of the camera. I just do that and apply a sense of humor to it. You have to trust the audience to get it.

I know how to tell a story to a thousand people. Sometimes I don't know how to tell a story to a piece of tape on a wall and a camera.

Over the years I have photographed thousands of people. I have never stopped being curious and trying to discover new worlds. I have used my camera as a mirror for my subjects as well. I remember photographing a woman in her 80s for my book, Wise Women, who told me it had been a long time since anyone had really been interested in "seeing" or photographing her. When she saw the picture, she burst into tears. She saw something in the photograph, an inner beauty and soul, she felt had long ago vanished.

I like to be flexible in the way I take pictures. I do not use a tripod, and I move around in the crowd, of which I am myself part.... I try to preserve the dynamics of the street, and my way of using the camera tries to approximate as much as possible the way we see: focusing on details, opening up to wider angles, and composing all these very short, fragmented impressions into a larger mental picture.

When they took me to do the camera test for the vampire make up, after they put the prosthetic on, I went though the entire process, I went back to my trailer and I looked in the mirror and I smiled.

I feel like an artist often turns the camera on themselves and on their own families to understand who they are.

The original interest in making pictures that don't directly depict came around '97 or '98, when I felt there was such an acceleration of images in the world, and that was before Flickr and so on. So I felt a need to slow down how one consumes photographs. With the abstract pictures, I was engaged in trying to find new images, but in practice, it was a bit like throwing a wrench in the spokes. The omnipresence of photography is at a level that it has never been in the history of the world. I feel really curious to now reengage and see what the camera can do for me.

I was at a Madonna show many, many years ago and I was in the sweet spot and she came out and I mean it was the best part of the show. And I was shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting. And I'm like, "God, I must have shot a hundred pictures have I not run out of film?" And I opened the back of my camera and there was no film in there. So that happened to me only once.

I realized the exciting place was behind the camera with the producer, director and so on.

When the camera comes on, I am not Hayden any more, I am Lizzie!

The fact that there aren't an abundance of African-American males that are getting lead roles [and] that are getting roles that have prominence on the big screen. [It's] the same thing from behind the camera; maybe even worse. Coming up, when you're black and you want to direct somebody says, "Oh, you're Spike Lee" or "You're John Singleton."

I like to try to shoot in the city in a way that allows the city to go about its business while we're shooting, and that's always a challenge because unfortunately people on the street don't know not to look in the camera or interact with the actors.

My number one rule is to keep that camera rolling. Even if it's shaky or slightly out of focus, I don't give a rip. Even if a big old alligator is chewing me up I want to go down and go, 'Crikey!' just before I die. That would be the ultimate for me.

I think Jon Foo and my chemistry is incredible! Foo is a genuine introvert and I'm a genuine extrovert. We're the perfect ying and yang, on and off camera.

The camera is first a means of self-discovery and a means of self-growth. The artist has one thing to say - himself.

The act is in itself a lie. You're faking something. The girl is lying there, she's pretending that she doesn't know the camera's on, she's getting banged, and "accidentally" it leaks out? Everyone leaks their own sex tapes! That's a ploy to get famous - that's not about the sex. It's not like when Madonna did her Sex book, and it was an artistic endeavor where she acknowledged it and spoke about it and was so upfront about it. It's different. It's not upfront. It's not honest. It's a ploy to get famous.

You can always tell folks from nonfolks. Folks like to feel good, like to smile for the camera when there's a big photo opportunity for a really good cause.

When I was young and it was someone's birthday, I didn't have the money to buy nice presents so I would take my mom's camera and make a movie parody for whoever's birthday it was. When I'd show it them, they'd die laughing. That reaction was a high for me, and I loved that feeling.