Quotes About Camera

My main camera is a Nikon D3. I use a French camera from the 1800s for wet plate photography, I use a Hasselblad sometimes. But to me the camera really doesn't matter that much. I don't have a preference for film or digital.

The actors feel very free. The actor, he doesn't need to think about where the camera is, he just has to focus on what he's doing and forget the camera. The camera is never in the perfect position, and I think this is what keeps this feeling of reality. The frame is not perfect.

Film, television, and working with a camera is such an intimate art form that if a camera is right on you, and I've got your face filling the screen, you have to be real. If you do anything that is fake, you're not going to get away with it, because the camera is right there, and the story is being told in a very real way.

I've been acting since I was 2 and have always been on camera but doing a video is different because when you're acting, you pretend the camera's not there and you just do the scene and with a music video you're right in the camera so it feels weird sometimes.

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.

I think I did a couple of test commercials that didn't even make it on the air. That's how little I had really done. I knew almost nothing about the camera. In fact, I actually did know nothing about the camera.

Marilyn Monroe gave more to the still camera than any actress, any woman I've ever photographed; infinitely more patient, more demanding of herself and more comfortable in front of the camera than away from it.

When I got the camera on the shoulder, they give me a nickname. They call me 'the tripod' because I'm kind of short and kind of strong. So if I take the camera and I lock myself, you think that you're on a crane.

I am semi-ambivalent about being on camera - sort of low-key. I don't like being on camera stuff that much. I like radio and live performing stuff. I don't like the television stuff as much. Some people do. It takes a certain breed of cat. There is a ton of pressure and you need to read cue cards. I am not a good cue card reader. Being a poor reader was enough to make me not want to do that type of formatted show.

When I first started, I would go to Weist-Barron, and I studied with Rita Litton and ACTeen. For teenagers, it's a really, really great school. We did a lot of on-camera stuff, so you see yourself and what you do on camera.

'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.

Because of the way that I work with the actors and because a scene is not in this rigid and literal interpretation of something written, I can constantly change stuff, which means I can get a scene absolutely perfect, and then when we go to shoot it, the requirements of the shot mean it would be useful to extend the dialogue or take a line out or swap things around. So the camera doesn't serve the action. The action serves the camera. That's important. So it becomes more and more organic and integrated.

I'm a narrative-minded actor. I'm thinking of the story. I'm not worried about whether the camera is on the right side of my face, or where the camera is. I'm just going for the story.

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.

I used to always love taking photos, but I would always give a camera away to someone else. Now I don't give the camera away anymore. It also takes a long time to develop a visual style, and I think that the things that I was imitating were people I love, like Judy Linn or Gerald Turner, and then it slowly started to become more myself.

The fact that I have a little ten-megapixel camera with me all the time, is way better than having the greatest camera in the world sitting at home on a desk instead of on my shoulder.

I am very proud of my husband, both behind the camera and in front of the camera.

Ever since the invention of the camera, people have been trying to create 3D, because we see things in 3D, and everyone's aware that the camera doesn't.

Some people come up to be directors by coming through the camera department and there's not a lot of women in the camera department. The ones that are have to kind of prove they're one of the boys, I think. I don't want to get into trouble with generalisations but I think it's a fair observation.

People have been reading photography as a true document, at the same time they are now getting suspicious. I am basically an honest person, so I let the camera capture whatever it captures whether you believe it or not is up to you; it’s not my responsibility, blame my camera, not me.

It is not a camera, or a reporter that makes something real and genuine; more often a camera or a reporter does the opposite.

Just having the camera, being able to pull back from situations and be an observer, it saved my life... I realised I could find these intimate moments and that people trusted me. That, basically, my camera was magic.

I have produced all my music videos. Love to get behind the camera and get involved in the editing process.

Most screenplays, most motion pictures, owe much more to the screenplay. Ingmar Bergman has such an economy of language, so little language in his piece, it is so visual, his moods are introduced and buttressed by camera rather than by word or character. But again, that's unique.

After I discovered my degree in photojournalism would only get me a job in a camera store, I taught myself lighting. I read tons of magazines and books and studied the photos trying to figure out how they were done. I bought some flash equipment and played around until I figured out how to make a subject look as I envisioned it should look.

I'm not used to being in front of a camera as myself. I'm not used to watching myself as myself.

Off-camera, I sound like Perry Como.

There's something essentially fictive about a photograph. That doesn't mean that if you understand that, and you understand how the world is transformed by the camera, that you can't use the limitations or the transformation to have an observation that is a very subtle perception of the world.

I took a leave of absence from the internet company where I was working and bought a camera and a copy of Final Cut Pro editing software and made my first feature film, "Street Fight." It followed a crazy, racially charged mayoral election in Newark, NJ in which a young guy named Cory Booker was taking on the political machine of that city. It went on to be nominated for an Oscar and Emmy and was a real example of DIY film-making.

I make the woman look at the camera as a symbol of all the eyes that will see the picture I am making.

There is no one who can stop you; you find a mic, a crowd, a set of ears, and nowadays, a camera and YouTube, and you recite your poem. You have your say. I don't want to over-romanticize it: of course, any time an art form ascends, especially when competition is involved, there will be gatekeeping, chauvinism, and other unfortunate dynamics. But the beauty of spoken word and performance poetry is, by and large, its ability to reach people in the moment - right there, right then.

In the theater you rehearse in order to do the performance. And in the movies the rehearsal and the performance are kind of the same thing. You're figuring it out and hopefully the camera is pointed at you when you're doing it.

I know a lot of people who are very good at their craft who have learned - people behind the camera - who really have a lot to offer because they know what they're doing, they know what to do, they've made their mistakes.

In Slumdog Millionaire when you are immersed in the point of view of children in the slum and the bustle of the city, the handheld camerawork is amazing. A handheld camera is perfect for establishing point-of-view and for instilling the feeling that you are there.

In my hand luggage I always have my camera, iPod, make-up bag, tooth brush, cleansing products, clean underwear, socks and a change of clothes in case anything goes missing at the other end - and of course my passport.

Unfortunately, I'm not one of those people who take pictures, you know, carry a camera. Because if I did I'd have stack's and stack's and stack's of different act's. I got a lot here - I know what I done.

The more we can put the camera in a better place, the more we can take the audience on a more extreme journey with that character.

It is important to understand what are you trying to capture with a camera. What you want to use this tool for. It helps to begin to search for and concentrate on thematic photography.

Sensitive people faced with the prospect of a camera portrait put on a face they think is one they would like to show the world very often what lies behind the facade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe.

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.

The close-up has no equivalent in a narrative fashioned of words. Literature is totally lacking in any working method to enable it to isolate a single vastly enlarged detail in which one face comes forward to underline a state of mind or stress the importance of a single detail in comparison with the rest. As a narrative device, the ability to vary the distance between the camera and the object may be a small thing indeed, but it makes for a notable difference between cinema and oral or written narrative, in which the distance between language and image is always the same.

I don't like to move the camera that much anyway.

The camera itself, the photograph itself, calls up death.

I was really awful at auditions. There's something about sitting down and saying into the camera: "I'm Nina and this is the name of my agent." That makes me just die inside.

Animals give me more pleasure through the viewfinder of a camera than they ever did in the crosshairs of a gunsight. And after I've finished "shooting," my unharmed victims are still around for others to enjoy. I have developed a deep respect for animals. I consider them fellow living creatures with certain rights that should not be violated any more than those of humans.

As for the various kinds of montage photography, they are in reality not photography at all but a kind of painting in which photography is used - as pastiches of textiles are used in crazy-quilts - to form a mosaic. Whatever value the montage may have derives from painting rather than the camera.

People ask me to smile for the camera, but somehow it always comes out gloomy.

I grew up in New York, so I fell in love with acting on a stage, not in front of a camera.