Camera Technique Quotes

Sometimes you're watching a great film actor, and if you stand 10 feet away from them, you're like, 'God, they're terrible. They're not doing anything.' And then you see the close-up, and it's so nuanced, and so much expression is happening. They were acting for that camera and for no one else.

I don't know if the camera likes me, but I do like the camera.

I'm very heavily involved in the editorial post-production process, and the camera - it's just such a big part of my storytelling language. I like creating the tension; I like creating the emotion through the movement of my camera, or the lack of movement through my camera, depending on what fits the scene best.

A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.

Photography, for me, is something I can control fully. It's wholly my own expressions.

Ultra high speed slow mo.

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

In my films that I've directed, and my work in commercials and videos, I've rarely used handheld. It's just not something I'm drawn to, but I've seen it done very well.

I started in documentaries. I started alone with a camera. Alone. Totally alone. Shooting, editing short documentaries for a French-Canadian part of CBC. So to deal with the camera alone, to approach reality alone, meant so much. I made a few dozen small documentaries, and that was the birth of a way to approach reality with a camera.

The important thing is not the camera but the eye.

I take it very seriously, the photographic craft.

Find the most puzzling kind of art you can think of, and then go out and try to approximate it with your camera. Take a photograph that corresponds to it. (Assignment to students.)

The head of the photographer is more important than his 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.

I came rather late to film. I've done an awful lot of theater before - before I discovered the camera, you know, seeing everything, requiring much less acting and - and much less presentation, much less projecting, more just being.

Like everybody, I wanted to meet Andy Warhol. I was impressed by his work and how daring he was. I think he changed the cinema completely, simply by opening his camera and letting it go.

For me, being in front of a camera is a matter of practicing and refining your art. I think, if you're telling a story worth telling, it's worth investing the time into developing.

I shoot a little bit, maybe two rolls, medium format, which is 20 pictures, and if it's not working, I change the position.

My first priority when taking pictures is to achieve clarity. A good documentary photograph transmits the information of the situation with the utmost fidelity; achieving it means understanding the nuances of lighting and composition, and also remembering to keep the lenses clean and the cameras steady.

Sometimes when you're making a film and something happens during a scene that you've just thought of, it can be missed if the wrong lens is on or if you're shooting in the wrong direction but this [performance capture] doesn't miss a thing. So, you might do something that's genius - very rarely, admittedly - but it doesn't miss it.

Because TV is mostly close up, it has to be fast. And because it has to be fast, you don't have time to explain completely, by a sequence shot, what's happening between people. So instead of experiencing what's happening, say, when a couple is dancing, dialogue is used to explain.

(On Ingrid Bergman) "I didn't do anything I've never done before, but when the camera moves in on that Bergman face, and she's saying she loves you, it would make anybody feel romantic."

The biggest difference for me was that I operated almost every frame on 'Mudbound,' and I didn't operate on 'Black Panther.'

There is something about this process, and about the whole 8 x 10 [camera] business, that takes it out of the arena of the snapshot, even though, of course, I'm always desperate for that feeling. I wanted those family pictures to look effortless. I wanted them to look like snapshots. And some of them did.

I believe that the best cameraman is one who recognizes the source, the story, as the basis of his work.