Camera Work Quotes & Sayings

A radio play actually ended up being the first acting job I ever had. A lot of times when I'm on camera, I'm playing characters that are more like myself, and I don't get to do a lot of real character work. But when you're doing animation, you are the very epitome of colorful characters. I think I'm just really into make believe. — Virginia Madsen

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

I come from a visual background. I used to work in the camera department at Warner Bros. when I was a teenager. I grew up dusting lenses and learning about photography. — Colin Hanks

Click! In other words, I'm in a very controlling position, and I can bring ... and I've already ... if the camera's on you, your face is very concentrated. You're listening. You don't know what I'm going to say next, and now you're smiling. All these things are the things I work with. — Richard Avedon

One of my favorites:
Robby gave her a skeptical look. "Ye're an angel of death. No offense, but I would call that a wee bit of harm."
"We're called Deliverers, actually. And we're not supposed to take someone before their time."
"How does that work?" Gregori lifted his camera, focusing on her. "I mean do you just go down a line, saying, 'Eenie meenie mynie moe, sorry, dude you gotta go'? — Kerrelyn Sparks

In theater, you get to rehearse several weeks, you memorize everything, and by the time you open, you know what the play is. In film, it's almost the opposite. You do your work on your own and maybe have a couple of minutes to rehearse. When the camera rolls, you generally don't know what's going to happen. — Seth Numrich

In the the late seventies and early eighties, I played background roles in thirty movies ... Woody Allen movies, Scorsese films, you name it. Whatever was being shot in New York, I was doing stand-in and background work because I wanted to be close to the camera; I wanted to see what was going on. — Tobin Bell

Screen work always boils down to that moment between the camera and the actor or the actors. It always boils down to that, ultimately. You serve the camera. — Alfred Molina

Really, voice-over is great. If it paid as much as on camera work, it's all I'd ever do. — Diedrich Bader

To copy Nature? A boy with a camera can do that. To get the spirit of Nature? A woodman or a shepherd can follow the trail of the whistling wind to hoarded sunshine in distant wolds. But to interpret Nature and inform it with a human personality that rises above it, invokes the divine in it, is the work of genius. — Ameen Rihani

He had three
incision sites: one where the microscopic camera had gone in and
two where they'd done the actual work, and the abuse he'd taken
today went straight to her heart. "Oh, Pace."
"I'm guessing that wasn't an 'Oh, Pace, you're so sexy, take me.' — Jill Shalvis

A lot of people think theatre must be much harder work than film, but anything histrionic or superfluous gets seen on camera so you have to work to distil it into a complete sense of what's true. — Eddie Redmayne

So between critiques, the camera flew around on its arm like some sort of drunk helicopter, getting reaction shots from each contestant, and then from the judges. They asked us to hold our reactions as best we could until they got to us. Ever smile for a photograph for someone who doesn't know how to work their camera? Twenty times longer than that. My mouth started to tremble from trying to hold a smile. During one of these awkward frozen moments, one of the contestants grinned at me and mouthed the words "I love you," and I tried as best I could to communicate my thanks while also maintaining my frozen face. — Lauren Graham

Gerry Fialka's annual PXL THIS is a reliably surprising and seductive round-up of recent work achieved with the PXL 2000 camera. This humble outdated "toy" continues to bring out the visionary child in filmmakers and viewers alike, and no one has kept the PXL flame burning longer or brighter than Gerry. — Michael Almereyda

I like telling stories, I like movies, and I want to work on films. I think I would feel safer behind the camera. — Suraj Sharma

Her eyes rounded. "They don't open until eleven."
"Unless you're me, and you strike up a conversation with the prep cook who starts work at seven."
"Ah."
"Get your mind out of the gutter," he said, uncurling his forefinger from around his own cup to point it at her. "His name is George and he has a wife and three kids."
"My mind's not in the gutter!" Well, not since she woke from a twenty-minute midnight doze during which she'd imagined herself stretched out on her bed, Gage standing at its foot, slowing stripping off his clothes.
He grinned at her, then reached into his front pocket to pull free a slim camera. Still juggling his coffee, he managed to bring the viewfinder to his eye and snap a shot. "I'll call it 'Guilty as Charged.'"
"That's an invasion of privacy," she said, frowning at him.
"I think that blush indicates that you've been mentally invading mine."
"Gage! — Christie Ridgway

I think at this point, I'd eventually like to work behind the camera. That's not to say I would never act again, I'm not quite sure to be honest. — Jonathan Taylor Thomas

When I work, I really try to get absorbed in the character. Unless I want to do something playful with the camera, I'm not too worried about where the camera is or positions. — Nicolas Cage

Theater for me is terrifying but much more rewarding, because you know what they're seeing. Film is all little bits and pieces. And you can do an amazing job, but if the camera isn't getting it, it doesn't work. And then other times when you feel you really weren't present, and then you see it and somehow it works. So there's a mystery, there's a strange collaboration that takes place with everybody. — Susan Sarandon

I think the theater work and the on-camera work feed off each other. My theater work has become more simple, and my on-camera work has become more energized or more spontaneous. — Michael Stuhlbarg

I was in the movies. I danced, I sang, I learned to work in front of a camera. It was like being in a repertory company. — Robert Wagner

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

There's a subtleness to camera work. You can really create intimate moments on camera, and sometimes that requires a little more precision from an actor because you have to pull people in as opposed to throwing it to them. — Corey Reynolds

I think [indications of vulnerability are] why so many portraits work when they're difficult: we believe we're presenting ourselves one way, but the camera always reveals something more vulnerable, despite our best efforts. — Katy Grannan

Cameras help to minimize collateral damage, and very often, without a camera a missile cannot fire. Certainly, without a camera a drone can't function, which means that the very ways in which we wage war are determined in part by how cameras work and whether they work at all. — Judith Butler

The first time I saw 'Private Practice,' I was hooked. The camera work is captivating, the acting is the-best-of-the-best amazing, and each storyline is so interesting and different. — Rachel G. Fox

Acting time is like flight time: You can work on a simulator, you can rehearse, but unless you're really in front of the camera or on a stage - that's when you really learn how to work it. — John Kapelos

A model's opinion seldom matters. The only time that he is required to open his mouth is when he is required to smile at the camera. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The first scene I ever shot for 'Louie Bluie,' on that first day, I had never seen the camera before. I didn't know where to put it. I just knew what was strong about these guys and what I wanted to capture, so I tried to work backward from there and figure it out. Trial and error. Hopefully I got a little bit better at it. — Terry Zwigoff

Why do you think there aren't rules to how sex will work? You didn't want to talk to me about what you wanted. You pushed me into the room so I wouldn't turn on the light because you knew damn well I would push back on that, didn't you?"
She stayed where she was. "Yes. I don't want you to see me. I don't look like one of those girls in a magazine."
He groaned, the sound coming from deep in his chest. "Those girls in the magazines are airbrushed and way too thin. The camera adds pounds so those girls are so skinny I wouldn't be able to fuck them for fear I would break them. I want a woman, Avery, not some tiny freaking thing whose waistline only proves she doesn't eat. I want a woman who can take me. I want a woman I can hold on to. So bend over because I want to see your ass. I want to look at it because I've been dreaming about it for days. It's hot and round and so fucking juicy I can't stand it. Get me hot, Avery. Show me your ass. — Lexi Blake

Kissing in the movies is a real art - figuring out where to put your heads so it looks good on camera. I have had other co-stars who couldn't work that out, which made it a lot harder for me. — Drew Barrymore

Rachel showed Ulani how to work the camera. Jason explained that the device would capture and preserve the image, along with their souls. — Brandon Mull

Pity the poor screenwriter, for he cannot be a poet. He cannot use metaphor and simile, assonance and alliteration, rhythm and rhyme, synecdoche and metonymy, hyperbole and meiosis, the grand tropes. Instead, his work must contain all the substance of literature but not be literary. A literary work is finished and complete within itself. A screenplay waits for the camera. If not literature, what then is the screenwriter's ambition? To describe in such a way that as a reader turns pages, a film flows through the imagination. — Robert McKee

With the growth of market individualism comes a corollary desire to look for collective, democratic responses when major dislocations of financial collapse, unemployment, heightened inequality, runaway inflation, and the like occur. The more such dislocations occur, the more powerful and internalized, Hayek insists, neoliberal ideology must become; it must become embedded in the media, in economic talking heads, in law and the jurisprudence of the courts, in government policy, and in the souls of participants. Neoliberal ideology must become a machine or engine that infuses economic life as well as a camera that provides a snapshot of it. That means, in turn, that the impersonal processes of regulation work best if courts, churches, schools, the media, music, localities, electoral politics, legislatures, monetary authorities, and corporate organizations internalize and publicize these norms. — William E. Connolly

The camera was waiting for me by predestination and I took to it as a musician takes to the piano or a painter to canvas. I found that I was master of the elements, that I could work miracles. — Alfred Stieglitz

I get that same queasy, nervous, thrilling feeling every time I go to work. That's never worn off since I was 12 years-old with my dad's 8-millimeter movie camera. — Steven Spielberg

Obviously, from the experience you get from making videos, you understand where the camera is and how some of the actual technicalities work and so on and so forth. — Shirley Manson

Audrey was a princess, so natural, the camera really loved her ... James and I kept each other company during all the rejections. We used to meet, have a cup of coffee and went from office to office to get work and never got work. — Ben Gazzara

In all my documentaries I did all the camera work, but in fiction I didn't want to do it myself. I think the machinery is so heavy and demanding that you would leave the actors alone for a long time. — Pirjo Honkasalo

Step Up doesn't have to hide anything. These are actually moves that people do. It just so happens that dancers are superheroes. People think there is a lot of wire work or camera tricks, but that's just not the case. — Stephen Boss

In the old days, before there was such a thing as film schools, directors learned the camera by watching other directors, and learning from their own dailies, and listening to the cameraman, and seeing what would work. Some of those guys could cut their movies in their head. — Don Ameche

To get from the tangible to the intangible (which mature artists in any medium claim as part of their task) a paradox of some kind has frequently been helpful. For the photographer to free himself of the tyranny of the visual facts upon which he is utterly dependent, a paradox is the only possible tool. And the talisman paradox for unique photography is to work "the mirror with a memory" as if it were a mirage, and the camera is a metamorphosing machine, and the photograph as if it were a metaphor ... . Once freed of the tyranny of surfaces and textures, substance and form [the photographer] can use the same to pursue poetic truth" (Minor White, Newhall, 281). — Minor White

I do, however, get along fine with apes and I have worked sack of potatoes in front of the camera. Trainers tell me they like my voice and that because I treat them as people they like me. Well, it's easy to do, since some of them are people and easier to work with than some - people, I mean actors. — Vincent Price

In terms of Cube I think he's very conscious of the technical aspect of the business whereas when you're just hired as an actor, you're not really secure in that part of your work and you're not really paying attention to where the camera. — Nia Long

I'm kind of a tech geek. With the camera work, I chose to shoot super 16, which has a real tactile feel. I feel it's as authentic as possible; I love the way the grain feels. — Ryan Coogler

Usually for cartoons, I record them in the mornings from 9 A.M. to noon, then I have the rest of the day to do on camera. It actually gives me time to work on my own projects. — Greg Cipes

Sometimes we work so fast that we don't really understand what's going on in front of the camera. We just kind of sense that, 'Oh my God, it's significant!' and photograph impulsively while trying to get the exposure right. Exposure occupies my mind while intuition frames the images. — Minor White

Some of the downbeat pictures, in my opinion, should never be made at all. Most of them are made for personal satisfaction, to impress other actors who say: "Oh, God! what a shot, what camera work!" But the average person in the audience, who bought his ticket to be entertained, doesn't see that at all. He comes out depressed. — Doris Day

Father was about to leave the house with his camera on his way to call for Mrs Walsh. They were going to a nearby park where, he said, he was planning to take her on the swings if the light was appropriate, and possibly on the roundabout as well ... Father explained that in outdoor work he has found a fillip which delights him. — Norma Hall

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

The camera can capture thought in a way that's quite surprising and shocking. You can become very simple and minimal in your work and communicate a lot with just a finger or an eyebrow, or a look, or a glance. — Leonard Nimoy

Fellini was more in love with breasts than Russ Meyer, more wracked with guilt than Ingmar Bergman, more of a flamboyant showman than Busby Berkeley ... Amarcord seems almost to flow from the camera, as anecdotes will flow from one who has told them often and knows they work. This was the last of his films made for no better reason than Fellini wanted to make it. — Roger Ebert

I come from Venezuela, from the independent film arena, and you work with one camera. — Edgar Ramirez

If I have an idea I want to put in a movie, I know what camera will make that look best, and I have ideas for future projects and stuff I'd like to build for those. I think it's just part of how I work, though. — Evan Glodell

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. — Don Hertzfeldt

I just want to do more work. Every time I step in front of a camera I feel young again. I really do. It keeps your mind active and it keeps you going. — Ernest Borgnine

Life is like a camera. Focus on what's important. Capture the good times. And if things don't work out, just take another shot. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

Q What makes a question "beautiful"? A beautiful question reframes an issue and forces you to look at it in a different way. It challenges assumptions and is really ambitious. Often, these questions begin with the phrase "How might we..." They have a magnetic quality that makes people want to answer them, to talk about them, to work on them. They make the imagination race. The Polaroid camera came out of a 3-year-old girl's asking, "Why do we have to wait for the picture?" That's a beautiful question. — Anonymous

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

Usually I work with a digital camera and compose my works digitally or give them a finish on the computer, in order to make them meet my ideas perfectly. — Loretta Lux

If I or any other black can deliver at the box office, I'll get a lot of work. Too many young actors, regardless of their color, try to play an attitude on camera and fail to remember their job is to fit into an entertainment. — Mario Van Peebles

'Donnie Darko' was my first audition ever! It opened my eyes to the possibilities within camera work. — Jolene Purdy

As a model, I am at the mercy of everybody else. It's much more of a situation where I go to work, put the clothes on, get in front of the camera, and then go home. But in that process, I never really have control over any of it. — Karen Elson

When I do work, I get so much done in such a concentrated time that once I'm through a series, I'm so drained I don't want to get near the camera. — Cindy Sherman

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

My background is a small town with no movie theater. So ... I always pictured myself onstage. I went to acting school and learned all the skills. I left early because I did my first movie and discovered that I really loved the minimalistic work with the camera. — Franka Potente

I'm a very private person. I don't go out much. I'm home with kids. I go to work. I don't really like being the focus of attention, which is why I like being behind the camera more. — Angelina Jolie

I think, on both sides of the camera or the novel: Distraction. I'm obsessed with: Can I get this actress or my third act to work? I'm distracted. I'm interested in that so I don't sit home and think, "Gee, life is meaningless. We're all going to die. The universe is pulling apart at breakneck speed." — Woody Allen

Most actors are lucky to ever get a job, period. I never forget that, because I have so many actor friends in L.A., and most of us barely ever work. And those of us that do, it's still only 60 days out of the year that we're actually on camera. It's an absurdly low number. — Emile Hirsch

But there is more to a fine photograph than information. We are also seeking to present an image that arouses the curiosity of the viewer or that, best of all, provokes the viewer to think-to ask a question or simply to gaze in thoughtful wonder. We know that photographs inform people. We also know that photographs move people. The photograph that does both is the one we want to see and make. It is the kind of picture that makes you want to pick up your own camera again and go to work. — Sam Abell

There still aren't enough[ roles for women of color]. And I'd say that's the case, not only for African-American women, but for all women in the Hollywood game. It's just slim pickings, and a very challenging time for us. I think that's why more of us need to work our way behind the camera in order to create roles that really illuminate who women are. We still have room for growth in that area, without a doubt. — Jada Pinkett Smith

Working on camera is a different ballgame in the sense that it's far more intimate work, but the basics and the foundations of being able to create something that isn't necessarily your own instincts - is a character that you have inside your head - whether you're talking about television or film or theater, that still has to be the grounding work. — Rose Leslie

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 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

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

When I'm acting, I have zero control, and it's the scariest thing anyone can do in that field because, you know, your face is always the one that's out there in front of the camera, and any number of things can happen to you once you've done your work. It can be edited badly, it can be distributed badly, or it can not be distributed at all. And I've certainly experienced that; every actor has. — Amber Tamblyn

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

One of the things about working for an old school studio like Warner Bros. is that there is an institutional culture and institutional memory, in terms of production design, camera work, and directors who understand how to do this kind of thing. — Bruno Heller

I like to do the camera work myself because I kind of feel it, you know, I don't articulate it, I feel it. It's the same with editing. — Nina Menkes

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

I don't want to direct music videos at all. Any work I do with a camera I'd like to be for a film. — Giuseppe Andrews

When I was starting, I was very much influenced by the straight up, eyes to camera style of August Sander. He is really the only one. Had I known then the work of people like Ken Russell, Vivian Maier, Helen Levitt, and Steven Berkoff, they would undoubtedly have influenced me too. — Derek Ridgers

I realized that my camera work could help me in a lot of ways to put the audience in the driver's seat, so to speak, to get them in there with the action, and to get them as close and be as intimate with what was going on on-screen as possible. — James Wan

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

Life is a Curious Thing. Winter turns to spring and Parvaneh passes her driving test. Of teaches Adrian how to change tires. The kid may have bought a Toyota, but that doesn't mean he's entirely beyond help, Ove explains to Sonja when he visits her one Sunday in April. The he shows her some photographs of Parvaneh's little boy. Four months old and as fat as a seal pup. Patrick has tried to force one of those cell phone camera things on Ove, but he doesn't trust them. So he walks around with a thick wad of paper copies inside his wallet instead, held together by a rubber band. Shows everyone he meets. Even the people who work at the florist's, — Fredrik Backman

I think the perception of me can be, you know, confused. But that's only because people only see that side of me when I'm at work, in front of the camera. So they don't see Miranda at home; they don't see behind the scenes. They see the glamour of it all but they don't see Miranda standing barefoot in a dirty old house. — Miranda Kerr

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 have a way to photograph. You work with space, you have a camera, you have a frame, and then a fraction of a second. It's very instinctive. What you do is a fraction of a second, it's there and it's not there. But in this fraction of a second comes your past, comes your future, comes your relation with people, comes your ideology, comes your hate, comes your love - all together in this fraction of a second, it materializes there. — Sebastiao Salgado

I like to work my camera as if it were a musical instrument. — Mike Figgis

It was always hard work to push through a crowed of reporters with the scent of blood in their nostrils. You might not think so, since on camera they appear to be brain-damaged wimps with severe eating disorders. But put them at a police barricade and a miraculous thing happens ... The strength comes from some mysterious place-and somehow, when there is gore on the ground, these anorexic creatures can push their way through anything. Without mussing their hair, too. — Jeff Lindsay

I first started doing hidden-camera segments on 'The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.' He was the coolest guy in the world to work for because he understands the creative process, and he had total trust. And he just let me make up whatever I wanted; I experimented and tried and played. We had a lot of fun over there. — Michael Carbonaro

Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures. — Susan Sontag

It really is a pleasure to work with someone who you admire. Whatever you do in front of the camera, and I don't know what it is, but actors have this thing that you recognize someone that makes you better. When you do that, it's a great feeling. — Benicio Del Toro

It's usually so fraught when you're taking a picture. I work with an 8-by-10 view camera and there's a, you know, hood that I put over my head, and it's tricky and complicated. — Sally Mann

If the guy behind the camera is not good, the pictures are bad. It's still you, and it's the same lines and everything, but it doesn't work. — Vincent Cassel

So when I became interested in photography and further being inspired by the work that I saw of Ansel and others, it was a natural extension to go back to these places that I knew as a kid and explore them with my camera. — John Sexton

I would love to work with Adam Sandler. Because then all I'd have to do is just turn the camera on and off. — David Zucker

Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow.
Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations.
The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight.
The camera obscura.
Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down. — Chuck Palahniuk

What I love about directing is finding common ground in complementary palate with wardrobe, set design, the camera department, the makeup department, et cetera. I love figuring out that synergy. To have everything work in concert is amazing, I love working with that kind of logic. Directing is a cavalcade of taste decisions - this one or that one, but I raather enjoy it and am in the process of setting up the next endeavor. — Billy Zane

Photography begins not in the camera but in the
mind and the eye. The real work is one of noticing and appreciating, seeing things clearly and differently, and
sharing that vision with others. I have developed my
vision and my photographic craft in order to bring
the beauty of nature to light in a fresh way that
can inspire and nourish people. — Bill Atkinson