Quotes About Camera

You put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

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.

Now everyone's main objective of taking photographs is to have a photograph for Twitter or Facebook. I find that troubling. If you have an opportunity to meet the Dalai Lama, don't work out your camera or iPhone issues. Sit and a listen to what the man is saying, because nine times out of 10, you're not going to look at that photo. You're not going to look at the video. As a photographer, I don't carry a camera. I have my iPhone, but I don't carry a camera. I want to live.

The film camera's ability to physically move through space, not zoom through space - every time we have a video camera the movement is through zoom; every time we have a film camera it is a physical movement.

The feeling I have reminds me of New Year’s Eve, when the countdown is coming and I’m not quite sure whether to grab my camera or just live in the moment. Usually I grab the camera and later regret it when the picture doesn’t turn out. Then I feel enormously let down and think to myself that the night would have been more fun if it didn’t mean quite so much, if I weren’t forced to analyze where I’ve been and where I’m going.

The camera can be a machine gun, a warm kiss, a sketchbook. Shooting a camera is like saying, Yes, yes, yes. There is no maybe. All the maybes should go in the trash.

I like having the digital camera on my smart phone, but I also like having a dedicated camera for when I want to take real pictures.

Basically, if you shoot your own stuff, you can just pick up a camera and some wireless microphones, grab a couple of LEDs, and you're off and running. And if you don't shoot your own stuff, you can just grab one other person to do camera and you can learn how to do the sound, and you're off and running.

Of course, you do not do any research: you have to go there and do your film. It's not that I would travel there before without a camera and spend half a year on one of those volcanoes and then come back with a camera. You have to have some sort of a clear mindset.

My first pieces, in an art context, were ways to get myself off the page and into real space. These photographic pieces were ways to, literally, throw myself into my environment. They were photographs not of an activity, but through an activity; the activity (once I planted a camera in the instrument of that activity - once I, simply, held a camera in my hands) could produce a picture.

'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 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.

Shame works like the zoom lens on a camera. When we are feeling shame, the camera is zoomed in tight and all we see is our flawed selves, alone and struggling.(page 68)

If a bout of "creepy face" sets in, the trick is to look away from the camera between shots and turn back only when necessary. This also limits how much of your soul the camera can steal.

And as an actor, just working with someone as seasoned and professional and kind as Richard Jenkins, it's always a learning experience watching him - on camera and off camera, just soaking it all up.

I started working in front of the camera for the first time when I was 15 years old. I joined a soap opera. We filmed in Brooklyn and I would skip class to shoot my scenes. It was terrifying and I entirely self-conscious in front of the camera.

Alan Rickman was such a terrific actor, and that was such a terrific character that he played. And it was a joy to be with him. We used to laugh together because we ran out of reaction shots. They were always - when everything had been done and the children were finished, they would turn the camera around and we'd have to do various reaction shots of amazement or sadness and things. We used to say we'd got to about number 200-and-something and we'd run out of knowing what to do when the camera came around on us. But he was a joy.

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.

Sometimes you meet someone, and they seem great, they seem exactly what you're thinking of for the role, and then you put a camera on them, and they freeze. And other people come to life with the camera on them. I haven't discovered any reliable predictor for that; I think you just have to try it and see what happens. And, you know, sometimes the people who freeze, if you find the right magic word to say to them, you can unlock them.

As a director, you want to be really connected to every part of your set, from your actors all the way to your camera operators. Everybody is a part of the creative process, and if they feel like they're part of a team versus just being a tool, they're going to give you something special.

Photos should focus on your waist up, unless you have amazing legs. Then it's okay to include one or two full-body shots in your gallery. The majority of your photos should be closer up, highlighting your face. Don't stage a smile. Instead, try to laugh just before the shot is taken. Flirty smiles that don't look cheesy also work. Make eye contact with the camera. Aim to take most of your photos outdoors.

When I'm on camera, I have to do things pretty much the way I do things in everyday life. It gives the audience someone real to identify with.

I always try to create equal power between the subject and the object, so as not to end up creating a relationship where the camera is here and the object out there. This is for me a very difficult and sensitive balance. When I produce a work, cut and frame images, I realize that spectators can identify with the images and almost forget that someone else actually made them. This would be the optimal situation. I don't know whether I succeed in doing so, but that's what I would like to have happen.

I remember they did all the makeup tests on me for Darla... Sorry, for "the vampire." I was the test monkey for the vampire look, so I went through numerous variations of the prosthetics and camera tests before I actually got the job.

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.

My stepfather gave me a Kodak camera when I was 17 years old. I started working at a local photo store in Le Havre, France, taking passport pictures and photographing weddings.

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 worked on 'Sarah Connor' even longer than 'Firefly.' And I always remembered how generous everyone was to me when I didn't know what to do, and I didn't know the rules, and I didn't know camera angles, and I didn't know lighting.

The joy for me of television is the sort of family feeling of being involved with an ensemble - the cast and the crew and the director of photography and the guys in the camera truck - and you're all coming together. There's a great feeling when that is a successful unit, a successful family.

It is inescapable that Ringo was the catalyst for the others. He certainly completed the jigsaw and The Beatles, with Ringo, became a magnet for the great camera artists of the world, a target for the jaded, lately hostile eyes of people who had hardly known that popular music existed.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I saw a man walk into my camera viewfinder from the left. He took a pistol out of his holster and raised it. I had no idea he would shoot. It was common to hold a pistol to the head of prisoners during questioning. So I prepared to make that picture - the threat, the interrogation. But it didn't happen. The man just pulled a pistol out of his holster, raised it to the VC's head and shot him in the temple. I made a picture at the same time. (On his 1968 photograph of the summary street corner execution of prisoner Nguyen Van Lem by South Vietnam's police chief, Lt. Col. Nguyen Ngoc Loan.)

I had started off, before I ever got an acting job, working at Robert De Niro's Tribeca Productions as a reader. I was always interested in that side of the camera.

Anybody doesn't like these pitchers don't like potry, see? Anybody don't like potry go home see television shots of big hatted cowboys being tolerated by kind horses. Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the poets of the world. To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes.

It's a very long and difficult schedule on a single-camera show.

I grew up around horses, but acting and riding on camera is a whole different thing.

For the camera, particularly, I feel like - I think that, as human faces become older, they become more interesting.

I have been doing this since I was nine years old. So whatever the role is, I am going to do the best I can do. The only thing I am concerned with is stepping on the stage in front of that camera and giving the best performance I know I can give, day in and day out as an actor.

The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.

There's always going to be that pressure when you're in front of the camera. When you're famous it's just an extreme version of reality and there's a pressure to look a certain way.

How are we doing, Simon?" she whispered into the small microphone in her collar. "Just about..." Simon started slowly. And then he stopped. "Wow." "What?" she asked, panic in her voice. "Nothing," he said too quickly. "What?" she asked again. "Well...it's just that...your boobs look even bigger on TV." Kat took that opportunity to turn and glare at the nearest security camera. In his bathroom stall thirty feet away, Simon nearly fell off the toilet.

All politicians have three ways of expressing themselves - the intimate dialogue that can often be violent and raw, then the dialogue in front of the camera and then big public speeches.