Quotes & Sayings About A Camera

You have to separate artistic ability from ethnic origin. Not only am I not black, I am also not a woman, therefore how can I direct women? I am also only 42, therefore how can I direct someone who's 60? So you see where the argument ends up? If you take it to its logical conclusion, I would have to walk around and point a video camera at myself. And who the hell is interested in that? — Gavin Hood

You find that you have to do many things, more than just lift up the camera and shoot, and so you get involved in it in a very physical way. You may find that the picture you want to do can only be made from a certain place, and you're not there, so you have to physically go there. And that participation may spur you on to work harder on the thing, ... because in the physical change of position you start seeing a whole different relationship. — Jay Maisel

The trick to being a good actor is getting so involved in your character that the camera disappears, the 50 bored guys eating doughnuts disappear, friends disappear. To get to that point when you don't have to think about it, you're just acting and reacting in those circumstances. — Val Kilmer

I couldn't stand in front of any camera, and I couldn't go to places where there were a lot of people. I thought people would criticize me if I smiled, or even if I just stayed still. — Im Yoona

A photocopier is a camera in its own right. I was fortunate to grow up in the time and culture that I did. I was allowed to develop an awareness that the art that really moves me is actually based on an original image. — Wolfgang Tillmans

The camera is just a machine, which records with impressive and as a rule very cruel faithfulness. — James Agee

I really love modeling a lot. Once I am behind the camera and start moving, there's a kind of energy that makes me feel good. But I know I have to prepare for something else before I grow up. — Lisanne Falk

I have a nice car, a Mercedes. And then I have an old El Camino truck that I'm crazy about. I like to get in that truck and go up in the hills near where I live, in Vegas, and take my camera. That, to me, is Heaven, being out in nature, taking pictures of the wildlife. — B.B. King

I love acting; I don't want to give up on it at all, but it would be nice to step behind the camera once in a while as well. — Lee Norris

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. — Paul Feig

On practical level I can't pick up the camera until I think I know what I want. I don't wander around. It's almost impossible for me to pick up a camera ... it's really hard. — Bill Henson

If I were to save one possession in a fire, it would have to be my dad's camera, an old, broken Nikon. I always keep it with me - his personal things mean a lot. — Gia Coppola

I wished I could paint this ineffable beauty but I had never been artistic. I hadn't even packed a camera, and my phone was out of charge. It didn't matter. I just breathed in the feeling, savouring it. Suddenly I knew that I'd enjoy many more moving moments and visions of beauty, and that they'd sustain me for the rest of my life. — Jane Wilson-Howarth

Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child. — Norman Mailer

I suffered first as a child from discrimination, poverty ... So I think it was a natural follow from that that I should use my camera to speak for people who are unable to speak for themselves. — Gordon Parks

Kaushik, what about a picture?" my father suggested. I shook my head. I had left my camera, my father's old Yashica, at school. "But you always have it with you." That look of irritated disappointment, the one that had appeared the day my mother died and was missing now that he'd married Chitra, passed briefly across my father's face. "I forgot it," I said. It was true, I did always have the camera with me. Even on quiet weekends when I came home and my father and I saw no one I would bring it, taking it with me on walks. This time I had left it behind, knowing that I would not want to document anything. "I don't understand," my father said. "Neither do I," I replied. "You haven't wanted a picture of anything in years." "That's not true." "It is." We were stating facts and at the same time arguing, an argument whose depths only he and I could fully comprehend. — Jhumpa Lahiri

I do voiceovers, but being on-camera and selling something? I wasn't really interested. And then I thought, well, wait a minute. Everybody's selling something. When you turn on the tube ... And then if you go to Europe or Asia, everyone is selling something. All the guys that don't want to be seen selling something here are selling something there. So I thought what the hell? — John Slattery

I do very little on-camera acting, so within a phrase as a voice actor you have to know how to convey when someone is 95 years old or 19 years old ... When I was the lead singer of the California Raisins commercials there was a traditional actor there as well and he would do all these body movements without saying anything because he was "acting." And the only acting the microphone picked up on was silence. — Jim Cummings

I don't particularly care about photographic authorship. Whether an astronaut who doesn't even have a viewfinder makes an image, a robotic camera, a military photographer, or Mike Light really doesn't matter. What matters is the context of the final photograph and the meaning it generates within that context. — Michael Light

I've walked with very famous people down red carpets over to the crowd of thousands of people, and you'll reach out to shake their hand and they've got a camera in their hand. And they don't even get their hand out, because they're recording the whole time. — George Clooney

I don't think film schools are mentoring kids. I think they just send them through the curriculum, so now you know how to hold a camera, how to use a Dx3 menu. You can learn that in five minutes from somebody that doesn't even know anything. But what do you know if you haven't read anything - studied art and studied literature - what do you have to contribute? — Rob Nilsson

When I make a documentary I shoot very little but I hang around with my camera for a long time. I look at the people for a long time through the loop and then when I see something interested then I shoot. I think that I have become very sensitive to these things. — Pirjo Honkasalo

I have to show who I am, play with the crowd, play with the camera. When people come to a race, part of it is the anticipation, "What is he going to do?" — Usain Bolt

To be honest, I don't see myself acting forever. I just can't imagine myself being a 70-year-old man fighting for roles. I would love to do small parts in my friends' movies or things that I'm directing myself. I do envision myself behind the camera as I get a little bit older. — Dave Franco

One time I told this lady to give me all her money, she said no. So I cut her and pulled her eyes out. I would do someone in and then take a camera and set the timer so I could sit them up next to me and take our picture together. — Richard Ramirez

When I got the camera on the shoulder, they give me a nickname. They call me 'the tripod' because I'm kind of short and kind of strong. So if I take the camera and I lock myself, you think that you're on a crane. — Luc Besson

Instead I just stand there, tears running down my cheeks in nameless emotion that tastes of joy and of grief. Joy for the being of the shimmering world and grief for what we have lost. The grasses remember the nights they were consumed by fire, lighting the way back with a conflagration of love between species. Who today even knows what that means? I drop to my knees in the grass and I can hear the sadness, as if the land itself was crying for its people: Come home. Come home.
There are often other walkers here. I suppose that's what it means when they put down the camera and stand on the headland, straining to hear above the wind with that wistful look, the gaze out to sea. They look like they're trying to remember what it would be like to love the world. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

The play is the source, it is orchestrated with words. In a movie, you are not dealing with as much as that. There are machines and wires. When you're acting for a camera, it keeps taking and never giving back. — Al Pacino

Stanley Kubrick was brilliant at getting under the audience's skin. He was very interested in the idea of, 'How can I tell this with just a camera?' — Tom Cruise

I had prepared myself for the second half of my life [to be] filled with other passions that don't include being in front of the camera. And then all of a sudden I got more work and more work and more work. And I went, "Well maybe things have shifted." And I think they have. — Sandra Bullock

Everything seems really simple on paper until you take a camera out of the box. — David Fincher

They got a lot of kids now whose uniforms are so tight, especially the pants, that they cannot bend over to pick up ground balls. And they don't want to bend over in television games because in that way there is no way their face can get on the camera. — Casey Stengel

She is bending over her child. She can't leave her. The
child is laid out in state on a table. She wants to take one more photograph of the child, probably the last. In life, the child would never sit still for a photograph. She says to herself, "I'm going to get the camera," as if saying to the child, "Don't move. — Lydia Davis

I don't use a crap camera, I don't eat junk, and I'm not going to a dance where the boys are bores — Adriana Trigiani

Gotten a good look at her face. But they didn't recognize her as Stark's cohort. They must not have been big on reading blogs or watching the news. Deirdre took the camera. "Sure. Where's the button?" He quickly showed her how to operate it, and Deirdre stepped back to get both of them in the frame. The camera had a telephoto lens. She aimed it at the top of the building, zooming in so that she could look at the skeletal upper levels, where they were preparing to moor a visiting dirigible. With such fantastic zoom, she could see that there were OPA guards in black suits waiting to receive the airship. — S.M. Reine

There is something strikingly different about the quality of photographs of that time. It has nothing to do with age or colour, or the feel of paper ... In modern family photographs the camera pretends to circulate like a friend, clicking its shutters at those moments when its subjects have disarranged themselves to present to it those postures which they would like to think of as informal. But in pictures of that time, the camera is still a public and alien eye, faced with which people feel bound either to challenge the intrusion by striking postures of defiant hilarity, or else to compose their faces, and straighten their shoulders, not always formally, but usually with just that hint of stiffness which suggests a public face. — Amitav Ghosh

I just feel that I enjoy the work more than I ever have ... or just as much certainly. I enjoy making films behind the camera equally to making them in front of the camera on all those years. I just enjoy it, that's all. I've been lucky enough to work in a profession that I have really liked and so I figured I'd just continue until someone hits me over the head and says "get out". — Clint Eastwood

I think what's exciting about doing it as found footage - if we all are being honest, found footage gets a little bit of a bad rap sometimes, but I think that there's a lot of potential in the medium in taking it seriously and in treating the audience with respect and in treating the characters with respect in terms of, why is the camera really on? Where would the camera be when it is on? — Dean Israelite

There are certain men and women who, from the minute they step in front of a camera, that's exactly where they belong. Connery's one. — F. Murray Abraham

Mormonism has this great cheesy aesthetic - when you watch their videos, it's almost as if they're about to flash a smile at the camera and burst into song. Mormon cheesiness is so close to musical cheesiness. — Matt Stone

For low light, all the light rays participate. We're using all the light coming through a large aperture to make a picture with a large depth of field - totally impossible with a conventional camera. — Ren Ng

As a director who loves the camera you learn a lot. — Alfonso Gomez-Rejon

People who have never done theatre before, and have only worked in front of a camera, would find it very difficult, I think, to know how to command a stage and work with the logistics of being on stage. They're very different. The theatre is quite tricky, actually. — David Wenham

We grew up with a camera in front of us. — Saoirse Ronan

I moved to L.A. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do, but I really like the entertainment industry. I started to make videos on YouTube to get more comfortable being in front of the camera. The first video I filmed was with my sister. — Rosanna Pansino

sound of it. Everything was more echoey here, including the falls, which were somewhere off to the side. In front of them, in the camera's light, Carter could see the edge of a pond or a pool of some kind. It was impossible to know how big it was, but it was feeding the stream they'd followed inside. — Jeff Probst

If the video camera was loaded with a tape, it was never seen. If Detective Smith made a report of the interview, it was never produced in the legal proceedings that followed. — John Grisham

Be gentle and tolerant. Intimacy will grow, but will take time and cannot be rushed. If all goes well, soon you will become more familiar with each other, and handling will forge awkward fumbling and fondling into more satisfying and productive caresses and eventually into a comfortable working partnership. At this stage you will be ready to accompany your new camera into the world. — Bill Jay

Whether they'll write the story of my life as a tragedy or an epic fantasy ... I was wondering if it was going to be a kiss at the end, or sad music and a sweeping camera shot over the fields I once roamed freely. I'm hoping for the kiss, but expecting the sweeping camera shot. — Maggie Stiefvater

The celebrity culture demands a camera-ready-at-all-times look or else the photo is circulated in a demeaning headline. — Zoe Cassavetes

My college degree was in theater. But the real reason, if I have any success in that milieu, so to speak, is because I spent a lot of years directing, I spent a lot of years behind the camera. — Alton Brown

A man with a camera was always suspected of being a spy. Moreover, the Jews did not want to be photographed, due to a misunderstanding of the prohibition against making graven images (photography had not been invented when the Torah was written!). I was forced to use a hidden camera ... — Roman Vishniac

I try to express with the camera what the story is, to get to the heart of the story with picture. In battle I look at things first in terms of people, second in terms of strategies or casualties ... To tell a story, you don't photograph one hundred dead civilians to prove there were one hundred dead civilians. You photograph one dead civilian with an expression on his face that says, This is what it's like if you're a dead civilian in Vietnam. — Horst Faas

We were using a hand-held camera to film the scene when Morse collapses. The camera wouldn't start. Three times they said action and it still wouldn't work. To this day, they still don't know what was wrong. — John Thaw

The best tourist is one without a camera — Kamand Kojouri

If you have a block of ballistics gelatin and a high-speed camera, pretty soon somebody gets a gun! — Nathan Myhrvold

I used to hate getting dressed, getting in front of the camera and walking down the red carpet. It bothered me because I felt like I couldn't be what they wanted me to be. Now it's still not my favorite thing, but I get through it a lot easier because I know that my work brings value to who I am. — America Ferrera

Before the invention of photography, significant moments in the flow of our lives would be like rocks placed in a stream: impediments that demonstrated but didn't diminish the volume of the flow and around which accrued the debris of memory, rich in sight, smell, taste, and sound. No snapshot can do what the attractive mnemonic impediment can: when we outsource that work to the camera, our ability to remember is diminished and what memories we have are impoverished. — Sally Mann

I just love the whole art form of acting, of being in front of a camera and playing different things. Not that I would ever say I'm the greatest actor in the world, but I am capable of playing different kinds of roles that emotionally I could get into. — Andrew Dice Clay

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. — Arthur Tress

Once there was a man who filmed his vacation./He went flying down the river in his boat/with his video camera to his eye, making/a moving picture of the moving river/ ... [At the end of his vacation,]/With a flick of the switch, there it would be./But he would not be in it. He would never be in it. — Wendell Berry

I try to express in my films things that no other art can approach. In my monster films for example, I use special effects in the same way one would use a special film stock, a special camera, and so on. Monster films permit me to use all of these elements at the same time. They are the most visual kind of film. — Ishiro Honda

We all experience it. Those moments when we gasp and say, Oh, look at that. Maybe it's nothing more than the way a shadow glides across a face, but in that split second, when you realize something truly remarkable is happening and disappearing right in front of you, if you can pass a camera before your eye, you'll tear a piece of time out of the whole, and in a breath, rescue it and give it new meaning. — Joel Meyerowitz

So about twenty years ago I gave up on painting - and got into terrible debt after buying a load of camera gear! — Nigel Dennis

What then is the difference between film and theatre? Or should one not rather ask: what are the differences? Let us be content wi th the reply that the screen has two dimensions and the stage three, that the screen presents photographs and the stage living actors. All the subtler differences stem from these. The camera can show us all sorts of things
from close-ups of insects to panoramas of prairies
which the stage cannot even suggest, and it can move from one to another with much more dexterity than any conceivable stage. The stage, on the other hand, can be revealed in the unsurpassable beauty of three-dimensional shapes, and the stage actor establishes between himself and his audience a contact real as electricity. — Eric Bentley

Strange, how such a small realization can affect everyone's life forever. In movies there is always a carefully staged moment - a big crescendo of music, close- ups of the actors' faces, the camera slowly pulling away to let all this sink in for the viewer ... but, in real life, most all of the extraordinary things happen with no more loudness than a whisper. — Silas House

This acting's serious! And I really respect those actors. It's a tough business to be able to be something you're not and be natural and convince people on camera. — Michael Strahan

To have an opportunity to get in front of a camera every single day is just priceless because it gets you closer and closer to being less self-consciousness in front of it and really being human and really making choices and standing by them. — Katie Lowes

It helps so much being on location. It's like the difference between performing for the rectangle of the camera versus a world being created and then the camera finds things within that. There's a huge difference in that, because what it takes away is performance. You don't feel like performing. You're just kind of doing it. You're existing. — Christian Bale

It's hard to do a camera inside of a car. Non-Stop would have been impossible. Usually modern lenses you can focus up to the lens pretty much, but anamorphic you can't. You need like three feet. — Jaume Collet-Serra

I was flying planes before I was driving cars. I started gliding when I was fourteen, about when I started photographing. I was a geeky kid, and the camera was a way in high school for me to have some power. Flying was, too, I guess. — Michael Light

I make the woman look at the camera as a symbol of all the eyes that will see the picture I am making. — Philippe Halsman

In a recent experiment, men were asked to rank how attractive they found photographs of different women's faces. The photos were eight by ten inches, and showed women facing the camera or turned in three-quarter profile. Unbeknownst to the men, in half the photos the eyes of the women were dilated, and in the other half they were not. The men were consistently more attracted to the women with dilated eyes. Remarkably, the men had no insight into their decision making. None of them said, "I noticed her pupils were two millimeters larger in this photo than in this other one." Instead, they simply felt more drawn toward some women than others, for reasons they couldn't quite put a finger on. — David Eagleman

I like the idea of having a film that is choreographic in all its aspects, not only in the dancing scenes, but also in the way the camera and the characters move in order to have that feeling that it's always musical. — Pascal Chaumeil

I did radio, I did television, I did opera, I did films in which I had very, very little to say. But I had a lot of experience in front of the camera, and that's what really counts — Christopher Lee

Taking employment out of the country - now that's taking away jobs. These shows employ a lot of people: production, post-production, music supervisors, camera people. A hundred people or more. — Corbin Bernsen

To go into more specifics regarding actors, whether they're from Korea or the U.S., all actors know if they are loved by the director. When they feel that love from the director, they respond by giving a great performance on camera. Also, everyone on set - the crew, the actors - they were aware of the film's message and its broad theme, so these big issues were never discussed on set. — Kim Jee-woon

I've stabbed a man to death. Had sex with a stranger on camera. My soul was stained black with so many crimes, but I couldn't bear to watch him die. Maybe that made me a coward, worse than Vinny. He had been sadistic. I had been selfish. — Lana Sky

I'm a successful businessman, a very successful bussinessman,' he said, dead-eyed to the camera. 'Guys like me don't kill our wives. We trade 'em in and get a new one — Gregg Olsen

In my heart I like to remain an amateur, in the sense of being in love with what I'm doing, forever astonished again at the endless possibilities of seeing and using the camera as a recording tool. — Inge Morath

I wore a GoPro camera on my head for all three of my boys. — Nick Woodman

Most of us, when we go out with a camera in our own country, try to find exotic subject matter to photograph. — Martin Parr

The plane touches down on very rough ground: its wheelbarrow wheels bounce and one set of wings rises alarmingly while the other dips. Now the Masai and the plane are converging. It's a magnificent shot: the Masai run, run, run, run; because of the optics it is dreamlike. The little plane bounces, shudders, slews and finally makes lasting contact with the ground. At exactly the right moment, as the plane comes to a halt, the Masai warriors, in a highly agitated state, reach the plane, and the camera closes on the pilot, whose face as he removes his leather flying helmet and goggles, appears just above the bobbing red ochre composition of plaited hair and fat-shone bodies. It is Mel Gibson, with a grave expression, which can't quite suppress his unruly Aussieness. — Justin Cartwright

Pages were always supposed to be off-camera - we were supposed to be invisible. But I had a moment where I saw a kid who was ready to flip himself out of the balcony, so I ran down and grabbed him and put him back in his seat. I remember the stage manager taking me aside and saying, "Can you please never do that again? I know you were saving his life, but we have you in the shot." — Anne Sweeney

I grew up watching Lindsay and it made me want to do what she does. Just the whole vibe. Being there, being on camera, or on stage, with everybody listening to you it's so cool when people look up to you. I've already been asked for my autograph and it's just a really good feeling to have. — Ali Lohan

It's so easy to pick up a camera, white balance, and shoot people having sex, but I don't think there's anything very interesting about it. You might get off, but that's it. — Sasha Grey

Butte was once a grand city. To me, that city is like one big stage for Edward Hopper. You could put your camera anywhere, and you felt you were looking at his paintings. — Wim Wenders

I loved having a crew. I loved being the person who woke at six in the morning and knew where to put the camera. I loved watching the actresses cry, and to know that if you were clever and didn't do too many rehearsals, that it just came that way. — Jane Birkin

I suspect it is for one's self-interest that one looks at one's surroundings and one's self. This search is personally born and is indeed my reason and motive for making photographs. The camera is not merely a reflecting pool and the photographs are not exactly the mirror, mirror on the wall that speaks with a twisted tongue. Witness is borne and puzzles come together at the photographic moment which is very simple and complete. The mind-finger presses the release on the silly machine and it stops time and holds what its jaws can encompass and what the light will stain. — Lee Friedlander

The camera is, in a sense, both a way to get close, and to break free. It is a testimony to independence as well as a new way to relate to the world — Elinor Carucci

All too frequently the amateur will purchase a fine modern camera and proceed to use it for making the most elementary simple snapshots. This surely is like playing 'Chopsticks' on a concert grand piano. — Sam Haskins

Writing is like a camera. You see the world from a different lens. — Robert Ahaness

Well, getting behind the camera is something I've always wanted to get involved with. Ever since I was doing movies like 'Zathura' I was very interested in all the different jobs on set and kind of soaking all the information up like a sponge. — Josh Hutcherson

People can't imagine an enemy that would cut someone's head off before a video camera and spread it out across the world. But that has happened with the kind of enemy we are now facing. — Kay Bailey Hutchison

I'm surprised how many commercials and sitcoms and movies have a need for, 'We just need something to come by the camera that's really weird.' They call Doug Jones. — Doug Jones

I always have a camera now that I've got a kid, but I don't think I've got one picture of anyone other than my daughter. — Georgina Chapman

Once a photographer is convinced that the camera can lie and that, strictly speaking, the vast majority of photographs are camera lies, inasmuch as they tell only part of a story or tell it in distorted form, half the battle is won. Once he has conceded that photography is not a naturalistic medium of rendition and that striving for naturalism in a photograph is futile, he can turn his attention to using a camera to make more effective pictures. — Andreas Feininger

We changed our rules. If a player does not have some sot of altercation on or off the court once each month, we fine him ... The guys that are our top four scorers, each of them will be required once every two months to appear on MTV. The guys who shoot the worst free throws over a one-month period, next time we have a TV game they're required to look into the camera and beat their chests after they make a good play. — Gregg Popovich

The fact is that the camera is literal if anything, which gives it something in common with a thermometer ... Often the tension that exists between the pictorial content of a photograph and its record of reality is the picture's true beauty. There is sleight of hand in photography ... you make the viewer think he's seeing everything while at the same time you make him realize he's not. I try to make my pictures seem reasonable and then, at the last minute, pull the rug from beneath the viewer's feet, very gently so there's a little thrill. — John Loengard

The people in makeup would buff away the shine on the face of anyone in front of the camera, and the sound blokes would clip a microphone onto the lapel of a jacket so it looked like something other than an insect about to crawl onto the presenter's chin, but Steven Spielberg this group was not. This was a low-budget operation, thank you very much. — Elizabeth George