Quotes & Sayings About Camera Lens

The difference in 'seeing' between the eye and the lens should make it obvious that a photographer who merely points his camera at an appealing subject and expects to get an appealing picture in return, may be headed for a disappointment. — Andreas Feininger

In 1982 I bought the newly released Makina Plaubel 55mm fixed-lens camera. With this shift from 35mm to 6 x 7, I also changed from black and white to color. Later that year, I started my project on New Brighton called The Last Resort. However, the first project I shot in colour was composed of urban scenes from Liverpool. This image was on the second roll of film. It's the first good photo I made in this new chapter of my work. — Martin Parr

People spot a big black lens, and they worry about what they're doing, or how their hair looks. Nobody see the person holding the camera. — Erica O'Rourke

If life were a camera, I'd have the lens cap on. — Charles M. Schulz

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. — Hannah Hoch

The camera's greedy lens sucks my image through it and splashes my pixilated ghost across his face in pale blue light. — Tyler Knight

I take bits and pieces from every director. I'd say Sylvain [White] and Nimrod [Antal]. They were more about teaching me lens sizes and depth of field and how to move the camera and lighting. I do want to direct and I didn't go to film school, so having a director that are very much hands on that way and looking to let me learn, that is a key factor. — Columbus Short

Love, even of the most ardent and soul-destroying kind, is never caught by the lens of the camera. — William Maxwell

The Canon AE1 - a fully manual camera. [My mother] had a 50mm, which is a standard lens, and then I got a 28mm. Then I started a little punk magazine, a zine, when I was 14 or 15 years old. I was shooting my friends skateboarding and it was the beginning of the Macintosh. We wouldn't do layouts on the computer; we would pick the font and then type up a paragraph and then print it out and cut it up and put it in a little mock-up and Xerox it. — Jeff Vespa

Did you bring your camera? Gracie grabbed her trusty Polaroid from under her arm and held it out. Light from the streetlamp glinted off the narrow lens. — Susan Mallery

The lens feels like another person in the room, a person who never speaks or smiles, who only stares without blinking, never looking away. — Lauren Graham

The camera lens or the television camera is still just a proscenium arch. And as a great old character actor once said to me, wherever you're acting, you reach up and take hold of the proscenium arch, and you pull it down around your shoulders. — Robert Preston

Anamorphic is very difficult because the distance from the lens to the person to focus is very long so you need a lot of distance from the camera to the person so that means that you need a lot of space. — Jaume Collet-Serra

I could be tiny and near the ground, unable to move very fast or far, but with a simple lift of a camera, that lens let me go places I couldn't even imagine. — Anne Eliot

I'd really rather leave it to others to say what they see in it and to see if I've put something into my photographs beyond a mere recording. Yes, I've chosen the camera position, how I'm going to print the negative, the angel of the lens, what I'm going to include and exclude in the composition, so on and so forth. But, I'm still photographing a work of art, and I would rather leave it to others to comment on my work, as I just left it to you. — Bruce Barnbaum

By this Yoshida explains that 'when we look at the actual conditions of this world through the camera's lens, we must deny the random movements of the human eye and restrain the eye's constant movements in order to focus on one point. — Isolde Standish

I start with no preconceived idea - discovery excites me to focus - then rediscovery through the lens - final form of presentation seen on ground glass, the finished print previsioned completely in every detail of texture, movement, proportion, before exposure - the shutter's release automatically and finally fixes my conception, allowing no after manipulation - the ultimate end, the print, is but a duplication of all that I saw and felt through my camera. — Edward Weston

I feel every shot, every camera move, every frame, and the way you frame something and the choice of lens, I see all those things are really important on every shot. — Roger Deakins

Always put your cap on your lens, because you never know which idiot will bump into your camera. And eventually that idiot will be you. — Ben Tolosa

The camera has its own kind of consciousness; in the lens the Garden of Eden itself would become ever so slightly too perfect. — Arthur Miller

The widest, most open, most accepting aperture, the one providing the narrowest, most demanding depth of field. She and Naomi had joked about the sexuality of camera apertures, that they needed to write a woman's monograph on the symbolism and cultural relevance of the mechanics of image-making as it related to sex, so that, for example, stopping down the fixed 35mm lens's diaphragm - elegantly composed of nine leaf-shutter blades - to a tight f/16 would be the equivalent of executing a Kegel pelvic floor exercise. — David Cronenberg

Amber was designed for life. She was designed for color and movement. She was not a girl born for the click of the camera's lens. No device could capture her, the way she was, the way she was meant to be. She was not born to be still or stationary. Without her color she was broken, a faulty image that could never be fixed. Without her voice she was nothing. Amber was gone. At that moment it was all clear to me. Everything to come was just a formality. — Matthew Crow

As for garden photographers, how differently they see things. With what ease the camera seems to compose a picture of great beauty with its discriminating lens. The naked eye can't censor some ugly sight on the periphery of vision; the photographer takes the perfect shot and picks for us just what we need to see. — Mirabel Osler

The world I feel, within the realm of art, is more genuine than the wrorld of matter. Artistic feeling is not tape measures, spectrographs, or flash camera lens. — Gu Cheng

I feel that doing theater does give you a good grounding to work on camera. The audience is the lens. — Julian Ovenden

Photographs don't discriminate between the living and the dead. In the fragments of time and shards of light that compose them, everyone is equal. Now you see us; now you don't. It doesn't matter whether you look through a camera lens and press the shutter. It doesn't even matter whether you open your eyes or close them. The pictures are always there. And so are the people in them. — Robert Goddard

I'm a natural behind the camera. My attentions are more toward behind the scenes, more toward creating, producing, and directing what's going on here. When I finally do pop in front of the lens, I'm genuinely glad and relieved to be there. — David Lee Roth

Frames 221 to 223: The motorcade is now in front of the camera lens, moving ever so slowly.
The President and First Lady are waving to the crowd. The President almost stands up to send kisses to a few ladies in the front rows, but the First Lady holds him by the arm.
The President sits back comfortably in his Lincoln. He is enjoying himself terribly. — Francis Barel

Ansel Adams rattled around the Southwest with his battered truck and his view camera, which looked like a giant accordion with a lens attached to it. — Joe McNally

When you see what you express through photography, you realize all the things that can no longer be the objectives of painting. Why should an artist persist in treating subjects that can be established so clearly with the lens of a camera? — Pablo Picasso

I see it all through the lens of my camera - the flurry of movement, the venue staff in black T-shirts, giving orders into their headsets. As I take it all in, my mind weighs the texture, the composition, the possibility of each changing scene, and I struggle to hold back, to keep my finger from pressing too soon. That's my biggest flaw as a photographer. I'm impatient - trigger-happy. I want the shot now, now, now, click, click, click, and if I could just wait a second more, the moment would really flourish. — Emery Lord

But now the train had finally begun to move, and Albie had switched the fearless truth-telling eye of his camera lens from his untied laces to the walls of the tunnels under east London, because you can never have enough pictures of dirty concrete. — David Nicholls

Seeing God is all about getting in touch with reality. If you want to photograph God, focus your lens on Hamakom, The Place, anyplace where you see divine light illuminating reality. Let your camera collect the light reflecting from the reality shaping your everyday life and you will find yourself photographing God in action." (From the Introduction to the book Photograph God) — Mel Alexenberg

Surveillance isn't easy, though. You'll need warm clothes, a camera with telephoto lens, two Thermos flasks (one for tea, t'other for wee) and for God's sake remember your sandwiches. — Alan Partridge

She doesn't like to talk about him, and I know that she hasn't been the same since he died. She's not quite here anymore; there's something missing in all of her smiles, like a blurry spot or a camera lens out of focus. Part of her followed him, wherever it was he went. — Kendare Blake

Warhol was the ultimate voyeur, constantly observing people through the lens. He watched and listened, but did not participate. Behind the camera, Warhol was in control. — Alison Jackson

I don't remember the first picture I took, but I actually found a picture of myself on a trip back to my old family home in Malaysia. I'm five years old, sitting on the floor with the family camera in my hand. It was a film camera - not a DSLR - with a fixed lens and a nice manual zoom. — Ren Ng

As soon as I look up, his eyes click onto my face. The breath whooshes out of my body and everything freezes for a second, as though I'm looking at him through my camera lens, zoomed in all the way, the world pausing for that tiny span of time between the opening and closing of the shutter. — Lauren Oliver

Embedded in digital photos is information such as the date, time, and location - yes, many cameras have GPS - of the photo's capture; generic information about the camera, lens, and settings; and an ID number of the camera itself. If you upload the photo to the web, that information often remains attached to the file. — Bruce Schneier

She stuck to side streets, riding slowly, with care. The trip took a little under an hour, and Diane was feeling a pulsing pain in her calf by the time sh pulled up to the front of the pawnshop. There was a black sedan with tinted windows at the end of the lot--the windows cracked down enough for her to see two sunglassed agents of a vague yet menacing government agency. One of them raised her camera and tried to take a photo of Diane, but the camera flashed, only reflecting the car window back at the lens. The agent swore. Diane waved a cursory hello at them and walked into the store. — Joseph Fink

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

Crowds, Scott said. People trudging along wide streets, pushing carts or riding bikes, crowd after crowd in the long lens of the camera so they seem even closer together than they really are, totally jampacked, and I think of how they merge with the future, how the future makes room for the non-achiever, the trudger, the nonagressor, the nonindividual. Totally calm in the long lens, crowd on top of crowd, pedaling, trudging, faceless, sort of surviving nicely. — Don DeLillo

I'm not a journalist any more. I don't have to stick a microphone up somebody's nostril and I don't have a camera lens behind my shoulder, I think people talk to me in a much franker way. — Gerald Seymour

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

I think movies say a lot [about real life], even more than theater. It says a lot about the invisible, that movies are so fascinating. The camera lens is like a microscope that goes beyond the surface. It's like you're exploring a secret, so you explore the director's secret, you explore the actor's secret, and therefore you explore the universe's secrets. — Isabelle Huppert

Behind the camera, I was invisible. When I lifted it up to my eye it was like I crawled into the lens, losing myself there. and everything else fell away. — Sarah Dessen

If you're a certain type of actor, then eventually stepping into a director's shoes is a natural transition. I've always been the actor who's very focused on the narrative, where my character is in the story, and how I can benefit the story. I've always had a technical aspect of what the lens is, how the camera is going to move, how I can feed the information the director applies within that move. If you're that type of actor, narrative-based, technically proficient, the next step is actually not that far. — Russell Crowe

Only the myopic magnifying lens of the television camera maintains the demonstration, march, and picketing as a modality of political expression; they have otherwise faded into meaninglessness since the end of the Vietnam War with the shift of urban form and activity. These acts and activities have been displaced over the past decade from the square and main street to the windswept emptiness of City Hall Mall or Federal Building Plaza. To encounter a ragtag mob of protesters in such places today renders them enve more pathetic, their marginality enforced by a physcial displacement into so unimportant, uninhabited, and unloved a civic location. — Trevor Boddy

I have a thing with the camera. The lens is unconditional. It doesn't judge you. — Debra Winger

It's different now, like pushing the stop lever on my camera until nothing except the war can squeeze through the lens. — Sarah Miller

My first experience with film was through a still camera. I would sit, very much against my will, with my father in the game reserve, watching some elephant or rhino or whatever, through a 400 millimeter lens and wait, and waiting and waiting. — Gavid Hood

It's great to get insight into the era of 80's rock-n-roll via a treasure trove
of photographs skillfully captured in front of Mark Weiss' camera lens. This
event is the perfect time capsule for Mark's work finally being released
upon the masses in 2012. — Phil Collen

Memory is a tenuous thing, like a rainbow's end or a camera with a failing lens. — Ellen Hopkins

You see the suffering of children all the time nowadays. Wars and famines are played out before us in our living rooms, and almost every week there are pictures of children who have been through unimaginable loss and horror. Mostly they look very calm. You see them looking into the camera, directly at the lens, and knowing what they have been through you expect to see terror or grief in their eyes, yet so often there's no visible emotion at all. They look so blank it would be easy to imagine that they weren't feeling much.
And though I do not for a moment equate what I went through with the suffering of those children, I do remember feeling as they look. I remember Matt talking to me
others as well, but mostly Matt
and I remember the enormous effort required even to hear what he said. I was so swamped by unmanageable emotions that I couldn't feel a thing. It was like being at the bottom of the sea. — Mary Lawson

Often as a poet I find that I am somewhat outside an experience I want to hold onto, consciously taking mental notes or writing them down in my journal - for fear that I will forget. It's not unlike being on a trip and taking pictures, your face behind a camera the whole time - the entire experience mediated by a lens. — Natasha Trethewey

One of the secrets of being a great photographic model, as it is for a great film actor, is that you let the camera in. It's an intimacy that the model or actor creates with the lens, that then transmits itself to the viewer. — Mary Harron

There is no romance without some lying. That's what romance is - a little bit of Vaseline on the camera lens of life. — Richard Jeni

The naked figures in the landscape have willingly undressed for my camera. They are either perfect beings heroically occupying their Edens, or else they are gardeners after the Fall, lost and exposed to both the elements and the lens. — Justine Kurland

Stage performance is obviously a much grander sort of depiction. The audience isn't right in your face as close as a camera lens gets. — Amanda Schull

Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera. — Yousuf Karsh

Photography is an investigation of both the outer and the inner worlds. The first experiences with the camera involve looking at the world beyond the lens, trusting the instrument will 'capture' something 'seen.' The terms shoot and take are not accidental; they represent an attitude of conquest and appropriation. Only when the photographer grows into perception and creative impulse does the term make define a condition of empathy between the external and the internal events. — Ansel Adams

Elizabeth Taylor is, in my opinion, the greatest actress in film history. She instinctively understands the camera and its nonverbal intimacies. Opening her violet eyes, she takes us into the liquid realm of emotion, which she inhabits by Pisces intuition. Richard Burton said that Taylor showed him how to act for the camera. Economy and understatement are essential. At her best, Elizabeth Taylor simply is. An electric, erotic charge vibrates the space between her face and the lens. It is an extra-sensory, pagan phenomenon. — Camille Paglia

I've always had the utmost respect and awe of what the lens can do and what a director can do with just a camera move. — Matthew Gray Gubler

Neither camera, nor lens, nor film determine the quality of pictures; it is the visual perception of the man behind the mechanism which brings them to life. Art contains the allied ideas of making and begetting, of being master of one's craft and able to create. Without these properties no art exists and no photographic art can come into being — Helmut Gernsheim

There isn't really anybody who occupies the lens to the extent that Lindsay Lohan does. Something happens when she steps in front of the camera. There is this magnetic energy. — Richard Phillips

I shoot with a few different camera's. A Sony A6000 with several lenses and a Lumix LX100 with a beautiful Leica lens. I like to travel light so I can have it with me most of the time. I really try and document all the places we travel to. — Eliot Lewis

Hyperrealism is more about objectifying ... how an object can be portrayed when it is seen through a camera's lens ... all my paintings are about an object being viewed through human eyes. — Liu Dan

Shame works like the zoom lens on a camera. When we are feeling shame, the camera is zoomed in tight and all we see is our flawed selves, alone and struggling.(page 68) — Brene Brown

If the photographer is interested in the people in front of his lens, and if he is compassionate, it's already a lot. The instrument is not the camera but the photographer. — Eve Arnold

I've heard that it's some kind of weird two-lens system where the back camera uses two lenses and it somehow takes it up into DSLR quality imagery. — John Gruber

I know of few actresses who have this incredible talent for communicating with a camera lens. She would try to seduce a camera as if it were a human being. — Philippe Halsman

Whatever she saw beyond the camera lens, beyond the photographer, beyond anything in the known world probably - wasn't fit to be seen. — Dennis Lehane

Photography is inextricably linked with life; the photographer is not invisibly behind the camera but projecting a life-attitude through the lens to create an interference pattern with the image. Who he is, what he believes, not only becomes important to know intellectually, but also becomes revealed emotionally and visibly through a body of work. — Bill Jay

We're so conditioned to the syntax of the camera that we don't realize that we are running on only half the visual alphabet ... It's what we see every day in the magazines, on billboards and even on television. All those images are being produced basically the same way, through a lens and a camera. I'm saying there are many, many other ways to produce photographic imagery, and I would imagine that a lot of them have yet to be explored. — Adam Fuss

There's just something about getting up, putting it out there, and getting this exchange of energy. Whether your audience is a camera lens, or live theater, or whatever it is, just putting that out there and getting it back is just an honor. — Lauren Bowles

3D needs a trained eye. It can't be done by everybody. People who just do 3D just for the sake of commercializing their movie another five or six percent and they don't know really how to do it, they should care how to do it better by bringing other directors and collaborators into their lives to help teach and instruct how you really make a 3D movie because it's not just like putting a new lens on a camera and forgetting it. It takes a lot of very careful consideration. It will change your approach to where you put the cameras. So, 3D isn't for everybody. — Steven Spielberg

now. They were spirits in their purest forms. Some called them orbs, and sometimes they showed up on photographs. Many non-believers assumed such orbs were dust on the lens. But the camera could never fully capture what I could see. To my eyes, the balls of light were alive with energy, endlessly forming and reforming, gathering smaller particles of energy around them like mini-black holes in outer space. — J.R. Rain

To the oft-asked question, What camera or lens do you use? I can only reply I couldn't tell to save my soul - it is enough for me to know that I have something that will make pictures and that it is in working order. — Edward S. Curtis

When a regular camera focuses physically, what the regular camera is doing is adjusting the lens relative to the sensor to bring different parts of the scene into focus. — Ren Ng

People have forgotten to use their memories. They look at life through the lens of a camera or the screen of a cell phone instead of remembering how it looks, how it smells — Jamie McGuire

The donkey would've made for an ass-tastic photo." Tracy pulled her camera from her bag. Lifting her lens toward the balcony of a terracotta home along the alleyway, she captured a shot of rustic blue shutters missing a few louvers. "All — Beverly Preston

Amanda bit her lip. "You're not ... trying to be funny or something, are you?"
"I'm not trying to be anything!" I said.
"All right, kids," the photographer called. "On the count of three. One, two-" She broke off, straightening up from the camera with a frown. "Excuse me. You in the turquoise? I need you to face forward."
I rotated my body as best I could.
"All the way, please."
I turned so that my shoulders werre even with everybody else's, only now my head faced Gail instead of the lens.
Gail pressed her lips together. "Stop it!" she said.
"Winnie?" Mr. Hutchinson said. He walked to the end of our row. "What's going on?"
"I can't," I whispered.
"Can't what?"
"Can't move my neck, it's stuck." Tears burned in my eyes, and I blinked hard to keep them back.
"Mr. Hutchinson, she's faking," Gail said. "She's trying to be funny and she's ruining everything. — Lauren Myracle

I've traveled across the world, trying to outrun my memories of you. But damned if I didn't get to every fucking continent and still see your face on the other side of my camera lens - in a crowded Tibetan market, on the cliffside of a snowy Himalayan peak, in the reflection of a muddy river in Thailand. You were always there, haunting me, around every corner. — Julie Johnson

What is faked [by the computerization of image-making], of course, is not reality, but photographic reality, reality as seen by the camera lens. In other words, what computer graphics have (almost) achieved is not realism, but rather only photorealism - the ability to fake not our perceptual and bodily experience of reality but only its photographic image. — Lev Manovich

! discovered photography completely by chance. My wife is an architect; when we were young and living in Paris, she bought a camera to take pictures of buildings. For the first time, I looked through a lens - and photography immediately started to invade my life. — Sebastiao Salgado

Forget the camera, forget the lens, forget all of that. With any four-dollar camera, you can capture the best picture. — Alberto Korda

If you think about all the light that enters - that enters the lens of a camera, that's much more than a photo. The light field is all the higher-dimensional information that's lost in a regular photo. When we record all this information, that provides us the opportunity in software after the fact. — Ren Ng

Perhaps it goes without saying that I believe in the geographic cure. Of course you can't out-travel sadness. You will find it has smuggled itself along in your suitcase. It coats the camera lens, it flavors the local cuisine. In that different sunlight, it stands out, awkward, yours, honking in the brash vowels of your native tongue in otherwise quiet restaurants. You may even feel proud of its stubbornness as it follows you up the bell towers and monuments, as it pants in your ear while you take in the view. I travel not to get away from my troubles but to see how they look in front of famous buildings or on deserted beaches. I take them for walks. Sometimes I get them drunk. Back at home we generally understand each other better. — Elizabeth McCracken

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

The relationship between the famous and the public who sustain them is governed by a striking paradox. Infinitely remote, the great stars of politics, film and entertainment move across an electric terrain of limousines, bodygurads and private helicopters. At the same time, the zoom lens and the interview camera bring them so near to us that we know their faces and their smallest gestures more intimately than those of our friends.
Somewhere in this paradoxical space our imaginations are free to range, and we find ourselves experimenting like impresarios with all the possibilities that these magnified figures seem to offer us. — J.G. Ballard

There are events you witness, or in which you participate, that forever remain sacrosanct and inviolate in memory, no matter how painful that memory is, because of the cost that you or others paid in order to be there in that moment when the camera lens clicked shut. — James Lee Burke

In front of the camera and in front of the lens, there's no lawsuits, there's no agent, and there's most frequently no time limits. There's a longevity that's kind of built into it. I spend most of my time behind the scenes, and when it is time to perform, I'm genuinely delighted to do it. — David Lee Roth

Sometimes I feel ashamed at my lack of interest in all the new techniques of modern filmmaking, but I prefer to work with as little equipment as possible. If I have a good lens and a steady camera, that's all I need. — Sven Nykvist

If I had stood at the free-throw line and thought about 10 million people watching me on the other side of the camera lens, I couldn't have made anything. So I mentally tried to put myself in a familiar place. I thought about all those times I shot free throws in practice and went through the same motion, the same technique that I had used thousands of times. You forget about the outcome. You know you are doing the right things. So you relax and perform. — Michael Jordan

When I began to photograph nudes, I let myself be guided by this camera, and instead of photographing what I saw, I photographed what the camera was seeing. I interfered very little, and the lens produced anatomical images and shapes which my eyes had never observed. — Bill Brandt

A turtle swims in the background while this shark's face is distorted by the diver's camera lens. — James Mayrose

The kids in the League knew about the camps-vaguely. There were only a few of us who had actually lived in one and experienced the life firsthand, but there was an unspoken rule we didn't talk about it. Everyone knew the truth, but the truth didn't live inside them the same way it did for us. They'd heard about the sorting machines, the cabins, the testing, but most of their stories were gossip, completely wrong. These kids had never stood for hours on end in an assembly lime. They didn't know fear came in the shape of a small black camera lens, an eye that followed you everywhere at all times. — Alexandra Bracken

The whole thrust in my life right now is spinning my assignments around and making them work in a more personal way ( ... ) I wanted to go back and do the original thing: one camera, one lens, one film. You really have to put yourself in a position of danger to be creative. — David Alan Harvey