Lighting Techniques Quotes

I don't really believe in the mystery of cinematography - what happens in the camera is what the cinematographers create and all that nonsense - I want the director to see what I'm trying to do.

Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography.

Making a film is an incredibly technical undertaking.

When you start out, you're not really aware. I didn't have a sense of photographic history.

I was saying as a joke the other day that I love film editing, I know how to cut a picture, I think I know how to shoot it, but I don't know how to light it. And I realize it's because I didn't grow up with light. I grew up in tenements.

I'm not a photographer, so I didn't get into F-stops or ND filters or background, foreground, cross-light, all that stuff. But I was interested in the camera and the lenses. That's the world that I'm moving in, in terms of acting and giving a performance.

The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.

There are lots of different parts of movie-making that I participate in, but my favorite part is the making of it. I'm scared, every day. I keep thinking someone's going to throw me the ball and I'm going to go, "Oh, wow. Oh, god. I just messed that up."

It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium.

My photography is mainly focused on my work making movies, which I've done my whole life. I think I have a perspective that not many people have. And I get to take advantage of all of the strange sources of light on a set.

I like to think of Photography 1.0 as the invention of photography. Photography 2.0 is digital technology and the move from film and paper to everything on a chip. Photography 3.0 is the use of the camera, space, and color and to capture an object in the third dimension.

The process of making films is so technically demanding that it's a distraction. You don't spend your time thinking about the philosophical content, which is often very depressing.

I got into film school. I went and didn't know anything about it. Over the course of two years, I kind of got kind of good at it. You know, I had a brief moment where I wasn't sure if I could do it. I didn't know you needed light to expose film.

For example, Michael Mann's film Collateral - there is certain kinds of stories that lend themselves to digital photography. Some things are very raw stories that digital photography kind of lends itself to.

I've been working with photography for many years.

None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer.

I'll tell you, in making film, especially when you're an actress, you're always worried about how you look on film, how they light you, always working with your camera people to be at your best, with the expectations of our culture that you always look perfect and beautiful and whatever.

I have a profound respect for cinematographers. That is my secret sauce. Like they are everything to me.

And friends of mine that had photography class in high school would develop the film and make prints and I'd take them back to the track and give 'em away or try and sell them. Much to my parents' dismay, I majored in photography in college.

Every year or so, I try to do something; it keeps me refreshed as to what's going on in front of the lens, and I understand what the actor is going through.

Sometimes you feel uncomfortable taking a photograph, but that's all part of the job.

On digital photography: It's fantastic, but it's not a freebie for anything. You still have to have this (he points to his eyes), and this (points to his heart), and feet.

I love it when television is shot in a cinematic way and I think to aspire to that is no bad thing.

Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.

Light is the most important person in the picture.