Quotes About Camera

The difference between an amateur and a professional photographer is that the amateur thinks the camera does the work. And they treat the camera with a certain amount of reverence. It is all about the kind of lens you choose, the kind of film stock you use… exactly the sort of perfection of the camera. Whereas, the professional the real professional – treats the camera with unutterable disdain. They pick up the camera and sling it aside. Because they know it’s the eye and the brain that count, not the mechanism that gets between them and the subject that counts.

The camera cannot leave the man, but the man can leave the camera. It's in the style of documentary where you make an agreement between a camera and a man and say, "I'm going to film you now."

Zooming in, zooming out. I was shocked. I said, "Let's erase this right now, put the camera behind the stage and I'll do the performance just for the camera." He set up everything and I told him to go outside and smoke a cigarette. Come back when I finish. Don't touch the camera. This was the way how I've done most everything after that.

Under examination by the camera, a human body becomes for its inhabitant a field of betrayal more than a ground of communication, and the camera's further power is manifested as it documents the individual's self-conscious efforts to control the body each time it is conscious of the camera's attention to it.

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.

To be honest, everyone thinks that a digital camera is more reliable and every single time I work on any movie, it's just as many problems, the memory card doesn't work or blah blah blah, it overheats; it's the same volume as another camera. I think people are bit taken in by it.

For me, what was important was to record everything I saw around me, and to do this as methodically as possible. In these circumstances a good photograph is a picture that comes as close as possible to reality. But the camera never manages to record what your eyes see, or what you feel at the moment. The camera always creates a new reality.

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.

Whether I'm in front of the camera, behind the camera, at my computer writing a novel or a screenplay, as long as I get to entertain someone out there, I'm happy.

As a young person, and I know it’s hard to believe that I was shy, but you could take your camera, and it would take you to places: it was like having a friend, like having someone to go out with and look at the world. I would do things with a camera I wouldn’t do normally if I was just by myself.

It doesn't matter if they're in front of the camera or behind the camera. I know women who are producers who are surviving on nothing but juice and almonds.

Looking into my future, I don't always want to be in front of the camera. I want to be behind the camera and bring to life those family members of mine or people that I knew or the kids I grew up. I want people to know the different facets of black people, brown people, all people.

The camera is not only an extension of the eye but of the brain. It can see sharper, farther, nearer, slower, faster than the eye. It can see by invisible light. It can see in the past, present, and future. Instead of using the camera only to reproduce objects, I wanted to use it to make what is invisible to the eye - visible.

I'm trying to use the camera to get into people's heads. I use camera techniques a lot to articulate character.

I think about it all the time. I love filmmaking. Whether I'd be in front of the camera or behind the camera, I just love that world.

Before the days of video village a director should stand right next to the camera, look with his naked eye and if he sees something that is real to him, he'd look up at the [camera] operator and if he gives the look to indicate he'd seen it to, then you print and you'd move on.

I think I've spent more time in front of a camera than off camera. That's just the way it is.

Some people say the camera loves me, the truth is, I love the camera.

I think what's exciting about doing it as found footage - if we all are being honest, found footage gets a little bit of a bad rap sometimes, but I think that there's a lot of potential in the medium in taking it seriously and in treating the audience with respect and in treating the characters with respect in terms of, why is the camera really on? Where would the camera be when it is on?

Of course, the camera is a far more objective and trustworthy witness than a human being. We know that a Brueghel or Goya or James Ensor can have visions or hallucinations, but it is generally admitted that a camera can photograph only what is actually there, standing in the real world before its lens.

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.

The camera’s not a camera, really. It’s an open door we need to walk through. It’s up to us to keep moving our feet.

Working in front of the camera keeps me alive.

Strange, how such a small realization can affect everyone's life forever. In movies there is always a carefully staged moment - a big crescendo of music, close- ups of the actors' faces, the camera slowly pulling away to let all this sink in for the viewer...but, in real life, most all of the extraordinary things happen with no more loudness than a whisper.

The idea of working with Steven Spielberg was very attractive. He's such a master. He knows the language of the camera and of filmmaking, which gives him a great freedom.

I do have a concern about projecting. I've never projected or had any reason to project before. In fact, the camera has only gotten closer to me going from TV to film.

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

I'm gay. It feels so weird saying it on camera!

The sign at the entrance to my gym locker room says, no cell phones please, cell phones are cameras. They are not. A camera is a Nikon or a Leica or Rolleiflex, and when you strike someone with one, they know they have been hit with something substantial.

You have to be able to observe life as if you were a camera all the time, constantly looking at light and the way that things are placed and the way people hold themselves. You need the ability to see something in someone or something that no one else really sees and be able to bring that to light. Basically, you have to be an obsessive crazy person.

The thing is that when you don't carry a camera, that's when you see pictures in particular, or at least that's when you think you see pictures in particular. When you do carry it, if you do see one on the occasion that you do, you can take it.

In the the late seventies and early eighties, I played background roles in thirty movies... Woody Allen movies, Scorsese films, you name it. Whatever was being shot in New York, I was doing stand-in and background work because I wanted to be close to the camera; I wanted to see what was going on.

No matter how advanced your camera you still need to be responsible for getting it to the right place at the right time and pointing it in the right direction to get the photo you want.

I don't own a camera, so I travel with a police sketch artist.

I love the work, I love being in front of the camera and working with actors and directors and creating something. For me, it's like learning everyday.

I don't trust any camera you can't make out of wood.

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].

I like figuring out where I need to be mentally so that I'm not thinking about the camera and that it's second nature. I want to get to a place where I can exist within the confines of what you can do with filmmaking and not have to think about it.

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.

The camera can photograph thought. It's better than a paragraph of sweet polemic.

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.

And I also have a camera, a Web cam, and I have one at home, so I can hook up and talk to the girls, and they can see me while we're on the bus in the middle of nowhere.

The thing about being a photographer that's so cool is that you get to participate, but you also get to disappear. The camera is in front of your face all the time.

If you can show something as complicated as two people falling in love with just music and camera angles, well, just think about what you can do with football.

It's so hard, because everyone's got a camera-phone, and everyone wants to get their picture on the blogs. So they'll send anything that they have to the blogs. So you don't really get any privacy.

I've always said Thomas Edison invented the movie camera to show people killing and kissing.

I'll get cast occasionally as sort of the jerk version of myself, and I have fun doing that. But it's really better for everyone if I stay behind the camera.

Actually, the camera was never overhead at any time. It was always a side view of me. Subsequently, after the picture was released, I saw some scenes from above and my clothes being pulled-and I think that was added later.