Quotes About Camera

The camera is one of the most frightening of modern weapons, particularly to people who have been in warfare, who have been bombed and shelled for at the back of a bombing run is invariably a photograph. In the back of ruined towns, and cities, and factories, there is aerial mapping, or spy mapping, usually with a camera. Therefore the camera is a feared instrument, and a man with a camera is suspected and watched wherever he goes... In the minds of most people today the camera is the forerunner of destruction, and it is suspected, and rightly so.

The camera has a mind of its own--its own point of view. Then the human bearer of time stumbles into the camera's gaze--the camera's domain of pristine space hitherto untraversed is now contaminated by human temporality. Intrusion occurs, but the camera remains transfixed by its object. It doesn't care. The camera has no human fears.

Once you change the technology - from a film camera to a video camera, or from an 8-mm camera to 16 mm - you change completely the content. With 8 mm, a leaf on a tree will be made up of maybe four grains. So it's very impressionistic, almost like Seurat. If you switch to 16 mm, the technology gives you hundreds of grains on that leaf.

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.

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 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.

Depending on the budget [whether to use 3D on future movies]. I think I prefer 3D to 2D now. Also, because of 3D I have to use a digital camera, which is the way it's going anyway. That still confuses me, a digital camera versus film.

The true authenticity of photographs for me is that they usually manipulate and lie about what is in front of the camera, but never lie about the intentions behind the camera.

I was always in front of the camera. My mom was really passionate about photography - I have pictures of my whole life. I've always just been in front of my mom's camera and it's always comfortable to me.

A sitcom, you rehearse for four days of the week and then you shoot it all in one night in front of a studio audience. It's like a play every week, you just shoot it over a seven or eight-day period with a single camera. I enjoy this format of show much more. I'm a feature guy. I like making movies. So the four camera thing I didn't love it that much. I found myself slightly out of my element.

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.

Designing the technical aspects of my camera movement for me is very important. I want the camera to be a big part in telling the story as well, like what I really believe in with all the films I make.

I was given a small camera as a wedding gift from a very dear friend. My first pictures were taken on my honeymoon. As soon as I became familiar with the camera, I was intrigued with the possibilities of expression it offered. It was like a discovery for me.

I've worked with actors who treat the first two takes like rehearsals. And that's okay. If the camera is on you and we're doing a scene where I'm off camera, I'm treating that as a rehearsal.

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.

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.

I got a unicorn horn on my head once. I said, "Can you really see that on camera?" My producer said, "You can see it from space." I would have to angle my head a certain way so that I didn't look misshapen on camera.

The camera does not like acting. The camera is only interested in filming behaviour. So you damn well learn your lines until you know them inside out, while standing on your head!

Suddenly this camera, this thing, allowed me to move around the world in a certain kind of way, with a certain kind of purpose. (On receiving a camera for her twenty-first birthday)

I'd been trying to retire to the back of the camera for quite a few years. And then, in 1970, when I first started directing, I if I could pull this off, I can some day just move in back of the camera and stay there.

There's always been a shortage of roles for three-dimensional women, no matter what age. If you look at the statistics on women in film, be they behind the camera or in front of the camera, and it's pretty nauseous-making. It always has been.

I like working on one - camera. This is not false modesty, but I don't think I'm very good at three - camera. And it's not that I'm nervous, but I just sort of feel like my collar is too small, or my clothes don't fit. I don't understand what that is. And I don't understand the format: There's an audience in front of you that you're playing to, but there are also these cameras.

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.

On the brilliance of James Brown's dancing − and the frustrations of bad camera-work on dancers:cers: I think James Brown is a genius you know when he's with the Famous Flames, unbelievable. I used to watch him on television and I used to get angry at the camera-man because whenever he would really start to dance they would be on a close-up so I couldn't see his feet. I'd shout "Show him! Show him!", so I could watch and learn.

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.

My acting stopped being about disguise and became about truth which suits the camera, so my film career took off when I came out.

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.

When someone's acting for a scene, they can fool the camera. But in everyday life, unless you're watching and censoring yourself every minute, or spending all your time in the company of ladies, what you feel is bound to show in your eyes.

In silent movies, they tended to put the camera down, and everybody walked in front of it and acted, and then they all walked off. Cutting was quite infrequent.

Computer images, like camera images today, will be seen as representations of a simulated, second-degree reality with little or no connection to the unmediated world. This is one lesson we can learn from photographs, and especially from those of the last 25 years: images exist not to be believed, but to be interrogated.

A good browser, apps, good camera, and fast networking in your smartphone is just expected today.

It's like he would take a photograph of Sam, and the photograph would be beautiful. And he would think that the reason the photograph was beautiful was because of how he took it. If I took it, I would know that the only reason it's beautiful is because of Sam. I just think it's bad when a boy looks at a girl and thinks that the way he sees the girl is better then the girl actually is. And I think it's bad when the most honest way a boy can look at a girl is through a camera. It's very hard for me to see Sam feel better about herself just because a boy sees her that way.

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.

The biggest battle for a lot of people who come out of the theater, which is where I was trained, is that they can never forget that a camera is pointed at them.

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.

My urge to photograph is activated by an almost biological instinct for preservation from disorder. The camera is a mechanical apparatus that extends my natural ability and desire for meaningful organization. I need it to survive.

The camera can film my face but until it captures my soul, you don't have a movie.

I started out with this dream of being a director and doing cinematography and bought my first film camera at 15.

I grew up as a photo nut. Every Christmas I would get a new camera. It's a huge part of my life.

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

I want to allow others to reveal and celebrate aspects of themselves that are usually hidden. My camera is a witness. It holds a light up for my subjects to help them feel their own essence, and gives them the courage to collaborate in the recording of these revelations.

I guess in my house when I was growing up, I was comfortable trying to be funny. And my dad, of course, it bugged him sometimes. He was trying to rest, and I was constantly trying to say something stupid to get a reaction. But I like doing these movies. You can do it in front of the camera and then it's over. I don't have to worry about being in front of too many people.

I have pictures of my daughter, in the hospital, at three seconds, six seconds, nine seconds, and then fifteen seconds, 'cause dumbass couldn't get the camera ready fast enough. Yeah, ha ha ha. She wrote that in the photo album.

I just [take pictures] because the camera is something to carry around in my pocket.

'How do you balance the creative with the biblical?' One could pick up the scripture and read it to oneself and you would be communing directly with that information. As soon as you go into film, as soon as there's a camera, and there's an angle, and there's lighting, and there's editing, you're into the adaptation.

A camera can get you close without the burden of commitment. It's a nifty device that way, a magical passport into people's lives with no permanent strings attached.