Quotes About Camera

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.

Look, I really do not care about you. What I care about is the worlds that you bear witness to. You are nothing more than a dog with a video camera strapped on its back. As you walk the streets looking for a place to mate or piss or eat, the camera is on and we will see the world because of you... You carry the camera and we enjoy the world. (On images as autobiography)

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.

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.

Being behind the camera you have control; you have the ability to make decisions for characters, for where the story line's going to go, how you want to put it out there, how you want to edit it. Acting is like where you paint on the canvas, and being behind the camera is like being either the paint or the paintbrush. They're both a part of the creative process, it's just that they have two different functions.

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.

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.

It is clear enough by now to most people that the camera never lies is a foolish saying. Yet it is doubtful whether most people realize how extraordinarily slippery a liar the camera is.

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.

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.

I also know what looks good before the camera, how to move the camera, and how to get a story on the screen.

McLeod's Daughters was my first regular job out of drama school, and my first full-time role. That was great because I learned a lot, in terms of working in front of the camera. I learned a lot of technical aspects that you take for granted once you know them, but you have to learn them somewhere, along the way. It was a bit of a training ground for me, working in front of the camera and also dealing with media.

The camera is a natural attraction for a politician. And if a camera is here, we're going to be here. And we're going to say something, even if we have nothing to say.

Every photograph is a realization of one of the possibilities contained within the program of the camera. The number of such possibilities is large, but it is nevertheless finite. It is the sum of all those photographs that can be taken by a camera.

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 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.

Guys don't understand great art. They don't care that sometimes the camera has power beyond the photographer to record emotion that only the heart can see. They're threatened when the camera jumps ahead of me. Todd Kovich was pissed when I brought my Nikon to the prom, but I'd missed too many transcendent shots over the years to ever take a chance of missing one again. A prom, I told him, had a boundless supply of photogenic bozos who could be counted on to do something base.

Both those taking snaps and documentary photographers... have not understood information. What they produce are camera memories, not information, and the better they do it, the more they prove the victory of the camera over the human being.

I've always had two principles throughout all my life in motion-pictures: never do before the camera what you would not do at home and never do at home what you would not do before the camera.

I'm more of a short-hair girl; short hair is a lot more low-maintenance than long hair. And when you're in front of camera every day and your hair is being flatironed and blow-dried it's easier to have a weave so you don't damage your own hair.

In animation, there's silly things I get to do with my voice. I get to have a wider range, so my voice gets to dance more than it does on camera.

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.

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

I remember like that scene with Pharrell where they're at the music video shoot, we have this on camera actually, Pharrell's confused because we weren't doing the script. We were doing all this improv and then Diddy says to him... Pharrell's like I don't understand what's going on and Diddy goes, "We do a lot of improv". (laughter) I remember being we just made him into a comedy nerd. We somehow turned Sean Combs into a comedy nerd, so.

We used hand-held cameras 50 years ago. It wasn't something new. Sometimes we used a tripod, or we'd have a tracking shot, and sometimes - like when a character was being chased - we used a hand-held camera because it was right for the scene. In those cases, it helped the mood; it created immediacy and a feeling for the viewer that they were in the scene and in the moment.

I prefer working behind the camera.

I operate the camera, I always do it when I'm the director, and I like to approach it as a documentary, finding the images based on what happens, as it happens.

The camera is a fluid way of encountering that other reality

Many of my family members are teachers in the arts, and I picked up the camera years ago, in high school.

Off-camera, I sound like Perry Como.

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.

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 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.

I'm never certain of a performance - my own or the other actors' - or the script or anything... But to me it seems there's only one place in the world the camera can be, and the decision usually comes immediately.

When I look out [the window] at the big houses on either side of the road, it's obvious we've entered the rich side of town. Poor people don't post signs like NO TRESPASSING, PRIVATE DRIVE, PRIVATE PROPERTY, MONITORED BY CAMERA SURVEILLANCE. I should know because I've been poor my entire life, and the only person I know who ever posted a sign like these is my friend...and he actually stole the sign off a rich guy's yard.

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.

I had rescued the moment by using my camera and in that way had found how to stop time and hold it. No one could take that image away from me because I owned it.

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

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.

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.

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

I've got the luxury of being able to work largely alone, so I don't need to communicate difficult creative classeas to other people and can leave the whole thing in my head or on scattered notes and sketches that only I need to understand. So I can very radically and quickly change things as I go without tripping anybody else up. And the camera allows me to experiment and try new things on the fly.

My first time acting for camera really was for Steven Spielberg in War Horse. I was trained in theater and I was actually working in theater at the time. I had a small role with the Royal Shakespeare Company, which is a huge prestigious theater company back in England. I honestly thought that was as good as it got.

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.

We worked six days a week [on the The Breakfast Club], so you have one day off. So on that Saturday night, it's not like we could all go out and have a drink because Molly [Ringwald ] and Michael [Hall] weren't old enough. And Ally [Sheedy] pretty much kept to herself. So Emilio and I, every Saturday night, would go into Chicago because we were shooting outside of Chicago in Des Plaines. It's so funny, because even though we might be adversaries in the film, we certainly weren't off-camera. He's a very funny guy.

'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.

New video gaming systems are coming out that track every joint of your body. It's basically going to become a normal thing for us to allow Microsoft to put a three-dimensional camera on top of your television set looking at you, which sounds like a Big Brother scenario if ever I heard one, but, still, it's what we're going to allow.