Quotes & Sayings About Cameras

The act of photography is like going on a hunt in which photographer and camera merge into one indivisible function. This is a hunt for new states of things, situations never seen before, for the improbable, for information. — Vilem Flusser

There's so much stuff going on behind the cameras. Sometimes people think these things are done certain ways and when you watch that you see how hard and down and dirty it was. — Fede Alvarez

The thing that got Daley mad," one of the delegates said later, "was that Ribicoff had been ass-kissing him just a day or two before. He came over and pushed for McGovern to our delegation and made a big speech about what a great guy Daley was. Then he got up there and played the hero for the TV cameras."
Daley was on his feet, his arms waiving, his mouth working. The words were lost in the uproar, but it was later asserted by Mayday, an almost-underground Washington paper, that a lip-reader had determined that he said: "Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker, go home. — Mike Royko

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

I don't need interesting camera angles, I am interesting. — Charlie Chaplin

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

Either the camera will dance, or I will. — Fred Astaire

Most of the planet's terrestrial surfaces are visually accessible through video cameras and satellite imagery, if not physically within reach. Even the approaches to Mount Everest are now littered with human debris. One can drive to Timbuktu, which for centuries was synonymous with inaccessibility. — Alan Huffman

We shoot with three cameras, try to shoot both sides of coverage if possible. That allows the actors to overlap and to find moments that feel more authentic and real than what you sometimes would normally get in a scripted drama that's shot more classically. And that's something in 'Parenthood' that has evolved. — Jason Katims

If I may, I'd like to take a moment to praise Mark Zuckerberg's parents for not procreating sooner. Praise be to all that is holy that Facebook didn't exist when I was that age and the Internet then was but a Usenet group for Star Trek fans. I feel like the luckiest person in the world to have grown up when cameras used actual film because the only thing that stood between infamy and me was the clerk who developed photos at Walgreens. Thank God for him. — Jen Lancaster

The camera itself, the photograph itself, calls up death. — Nobuyoshi Araki

The AP has only so many reporters, and CNN only has so many cameras, but we've got a world full of people with digital cameras and Internet access. — Howard Rheingold

Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. — Susan Sontag

Anytime it was advertised that I was going to be at a particular place, the radicals would be there, the cameras with TV news. — William Westmoreland

Cameras and lenses are simply tools to place our unique vision on film. Concentrate on equipment and you'll take technically good photographs. Concentrate on seeing the light's magic colors and your images will stir the soul. — Jack Dykinga

I'm dying to get back in front of the cameras. I miss it like crazy. — Holly Valance

But in the old days, visual artists used to fall into two distinct categories: those of us who created images with cameras and those of us who applied stuff onto other stuff, with brushes or other tools. — Buffy Sainte-Marie

in Chicago, which has installed a multimillion-dollar surveillance program with more than eight thousand cameras, the Urban Institute found that the cameras contributed to a 12 percent drop in crime in Humboldt Park but provided no statistically significant decline in crime in West Garfield Park. And — Julia Angwin

Democracy is born in dirt, nourished by the digging up and turning over as much of it as can be brought within reach of a television camera or subpoena. — Lewis H. Lapham

Every video from Russia is depressing, it's like they have their cameras set to sad. — Daniel Tosh

The last jobs I had were fixing cars and covering football games for a local access TV station. As in driving the mobile van to the field, setting up 3 cameras, teaching depressed grownups and interns how to use them and directing the game from the van and then wanting to kill myself. — Louis C.K.

The head of the photographer is more important than his camera — Philippe Halsman

Digital held no romance for me at all. I hated it. I miss my big cameras. The working process, I miss it. — Gregory Heisler

There are always more questions. Science as a process is never complete. It is not a foot race, with a finish line ... People will always be waiting at a particular finish line: journalists with their cameras, impatient crowds eager to call the race, astounded to see the scientists approach, pass the mark, and keep running. It's a common misunderstanding, he said. They conclude there was no race. As long as we won't commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing. — Barbara Kingsolver

Have you ever heard of a good marriage growing in front of the cameras? — Brigitte Bardot

Everything has become so easy. It's great that it's at your fingertips, but I miss those good old days. And we're connected, but it can be very alienating. There is this distance between all of us because we're speaking to each other through cameras and monitors and icons and Emojis. — Rami Malek

Sometimes you just gotta get in front of the camera because sometimes you have a long break between things, or you're auditioning and maybe nothing's really happening. — Jonathan Lipnicki

But what does the camera monitor? Some cameras today can identify faces (to match the profile of a runaway), body heat (to trigger an alert when detecting an anxious - and thus presumably a suspicious - person) or logos of cars (to identify the economic status of a person, in order to prompt the appropriate advertising on a billboard). But the vast majority of security apparatuses today monitor movement.1 — Hagar Kotef

When we were kids, growing up in the sixties, the only images we had of ourselves were either still photographs or 8mm movies ... Now we have video, digital cameras, MP3s, and a million other ways to document ourselves. But the still photograph continues to hold a sense of mystery and awe to me. — Catherine Opie

The camera is the eye of history. — Mathew Brady

Diving has been in the game for years. Probably the coverage the game gets now, with all the cameras around, it gets highlighted a bit more. But it hasn't got any worse. — Wayne Rooney

The camera is a fluid way of encountering that other reality — Jerry Uelsmann

I'm not someone who enjoys long talks, long rehearsals. I'm very technical: I tell my actors, you come in, you sit down, you pick up a coffee, you look here, you say the line. We try it with the cameras rolling, and if it doesn't work, we adjust it until it does. It's very simple. — Michael Haneke

We lived a lovely, middle-class, suburban life in Philadelphia. And I really thought that the TV programs of the '50s, like 'Father Knows Best' and 'The Adventures Of Ozzie And Harriet' Nelson were documentaries filmed with hidden cameras in our neighborhood. — Richard Corliss

I directed 24's pilot. I felt we should follow the characters around as if we were a documentary crew, using available light, hand-held cameras, split screens, sound that isn't always what it should be, to suit the reality of the premise. — Stephen Hopkins

Cameras get in the way of seeing. — Le Corbusier

Even with cameras being very cheap, one thing that researchers noticed was that you look really bad in a videoconference image because the lighting is bad and you get shadows and things. — Bill Gates

The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh. — Edward Weston

It turns out umpires and judges are not robots or traffic cameras, inertly monitoring deviations from a fixed zone of the permissible. They are humans. — Eric Liu

Pretty early on in making the first movie I realized that this is what I wanted to do. I felt like by that time I just found my niche, like this is what I was supposed to be doing. So I completely submerged myself into the world of watching movies, making my own movies, buying video cameras and lights. When I wasn't making a movie, I was making my own movies. When I wasn't making movies, I was watching movies. I was going back and studying film and looking back at guys that were perceived as great guys that I can identify with. It just became my life. — Mark Wahlberg

If some magic thing happens, and everybody goes completely nuts, and does something we never thought of, the cameras catch everything. That comes from having camera people who are almost like actors and writers themselves. — Paul Feig

A camera exposes more than just an image. It also exposes the photographer. — Steve Coleman

I started with the Oakland A's back in 1971 and there was press at every game and there were cameras on me when I was that young. So with 20 years being MC Hammer, I'm comfortable with cameras so when the camera goes on, I continue doing what I'm doing. — MC Hammer

I compose the frame literally with the camera. Unless it makes a story point. — Steven Spielberg

Neethan is a tall dude, six-eight, and watching him come out of a limo is like watching a cleverly designed Japanese toy robot arachnid emerge from a box, propelling a torso on which nods his head, across which is splashed a smile of idealized teeth, teeth so gleaming you could brush your own teeth looking into them, teeth that still look fantastic blown up two stories tall on the side of a building, a sexual promise to nameless fans encoded in bicuspid, molar, incisor, and canine. The arm rises, a wave, a hello, an acknowledgement that the assembled journalists exist and through the conduits of their cameras exist the public. Neethan F. Jordan has arrived! — Ryan Boudinot

If you've got five cameras, you're making sure that you're in the right position for each one of the cameras. — Jacinda Barrett

My house is full of antics, mayhem, foolishness, carrying on, cutting up, shucking and jiving, and I have that whether cameras are there or not. Our youngest just had us up with her shenanigans and hijinks all night. So, it's all the time, even off camera. — Niecy Nash

There's been a lot of talk about body cameras as a silver bullet or a solution. I think the task force concluded that there is a role for technology to play in building additional trust and accountability, but it's not a panacea, it has to be embedded in a broader change in culture and a legal framework that ensures that people's privacy is respected and that not only police officers but the community themselves feel comfortable with how technologies are being used. — Barack Obama

The best visual effects are when you shoot as much of what you can in camera. And it's really good for the actor's performance to have something real. — Rob Letterman

Look, at the same time that I don't want to be a celebrity, I understand that when you make movies you put yourself out in the public eye. I'd be a baby and a fool to be like, 'Why are there cameras taking pictures of me?' when I'm on a billboard for a movie. I think that's a very absurd concept. — Jonah Hill

Suddenly this camera, this thing, allowed me to move around the world in a certain kind of way, with a certain kind of purpose. (On receiving a camera for her twenty-first birthday) — Carrie Mae Weems

Having been in front of the camera just a couple of times, I'm empathetic, because it's very disconcerting. Someone shuffles you off to the trailer; you sit there for eleven hours wondering what the hell's going on. — Kurt Voss

The same camera that photographs a murder scene can photograph a beautiful society affair at a big hotel. — Weegee

The eighties?' I said. 'As in, the nineteen-eighties? The decade that taste forgot? Honest, Sophie, ask your granny. Ask mine, if you like. She'll tell you the only good thing about it was that the internet and phone cameras weren't invented, well hardly anyway, so most of the awful photos are lying out of sight in drawers and shoeboxes. — Ken MacLeod

We have all the technology to record things in the streets. Now the historians cannot twist it or change it, because we have cellular phones or video cameras, and we are filming in the streets what's going on. We have the voices of everybody recorded. There's too much recording and I think that's wonderful. — Isabel Allende

There is something abominable about cameras, because they possess the power to invent many worlds. As an artist who has been lost in this wilderness of mechanical reproduction for many years, I do not know which world to start with. I have seen fellow artists driven to the point of frenzy by photography. — Robert Smithson

There are times when you want your privacy, when you don't want the cameras in your face capturing your every move, every tear, every look. But I've gotten used to it. — Audrina Patridge

I did a film called 'Floating' early on that had a scene which was similar to a real-life situation I was in at the time. It involved me having a conversation with my father, who was dying. It was close to home and it made me realise acting wasn't just making faces for the cameras, it was a real art form. — Norman Reedus

The camera is one of the greatest liars of our time. — John Gunther

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 hate crowds and making speeches. I hate facing cameras and having to answer to a crossfire of questions. Why popular fancy should seize upon me, a scientist, dealing in abstract things and happy if left alone, is a manifestation of mass psychology that is beyond me. — Albert Einstein

Our fascination with the outlaw, the killer, the meth dealer, is emblematic of a pretty embarrassing problem: we trim the fat of evil. We size it up, add a glitter to it never present in reality, and make it pretty for the cameras. It looks more boring and crude than anything else, so we give it a tummy tuck. — John Thomas Allen

Harry S. Truman had his moods. His birthplace is the only tourist attraction in America where you don't see Japanese with cameras. — A. Whitney Brown

I used to like doing karaoke until cell-phone cameras came along. — Fred Schneider

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

You're in the gym eight hours a day; you're not preparing for cameras and running around and doing tour stops and making acting appearances. — McKayla Maroney

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

I usually bring a point and shoot with me so I can go out on the weekends and shoot a bit. I used to bring more cameras, but I'm also an Ebay nut so sometimes I'll order something if I'm really pining for it when I'm on location. — Anton Yelchin

I will never lose anything that an audience will miss.I turned things that were scripted as effects into in-camera stuff, which is sexier. — Adam Shankman

I think if you'd had television cameras at Gettysburg, this would be two nations today. People would not have put up with that carnage if they saw it up close. We'd have elected McClellan in 1864. — George Will

Would it be alright if I ripped your clothes?" I breathed out, obviously not thinking about what I was saying or caring in the least. "Cameras," was all he replied. "What?" "There are cameras in the garage," he explained in a deep, hoarse voice. I looked up and saw the big black glob pointed right at us and I sighed. Good Lord, two seconds longer and I would have been on YouTube under the heading, "Author does research in a parking garage. — C.P. Smith

I used to watch 'The Apprentice' all the time and I thought Bill was a fox. That was that, we didn't see each other for years, and then we saw each other and 45 minutes after the cameras stopped rolling, we were still talking. — Giuliana Rancic

In the theater you rehearse in order to do the performance. And in the movies the rehearsal and the performance are kind of the same thing. You're figuring it out and hopefully the camera is pointed at you when you're doing it. — Christopher Walken

I leaned right over to kiss your stoney book A little jealous of the ships with whom you flirt A billion lovers with their cameras Snap to look and in my fantasy I sail beneath your skirt — Andy Partridge

I find it very difficult to do anything on my own now because people recognize me. This has never happened to me before because I haven't really done television before. But I suppose if you're in people's rooms all the time, I don't know - I was thinking the other night with people like DiCaprio and, you know, those big stars and Cate Blanchett, and you just think how did they exist? It's so difficult. And I think now it's very intrusive because of these cellphones, you know, with cameras. — Maggie Smith

Probably one of the worst things that happened to photography is that cameras have viewfinders. — John Baldessari

Sometimes the character will go into a completely different direction than I expected once the cameras start rolling. That's what I love about what I do. — Lorraine Toussaint

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

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

My mother was either telepathic or she had secret cameras in my apartment, and I hoped for the latter. — Atom Yang

The truth is I've always been a Christian. What's amazing, is that the flaws that come with Christianity are really weird, because mine have a microphone and a camera attached to them. Most people don't have to live under that microscope. — Steve Harvey

The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces. — Marshall McLuhan

In the age of cellphone cameras, everybody thinks of themselves as a tracker. — Carl Forti

Wimbledon attracted Bill Clinton to the gallery at Centre Court Tuesday at the All England Club. NBC cameras showed his head turning back and forth with each volley. Even at a tennis match, it looks like he's denying everything. — Argus Hamilton

I lived through being pooh-poohed by fine art galleries, saying, "Digital is going to destroy the meaning behind photos." The motion side, the moment all of the cameras come alive with that motion, it was like a dream come true. It enables people to economically experiment with film. — Russell James

I use an 8 x 10 view camera. All other cameras are just toys. — Jock Sturges

Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers. — Pat Conroy

We had the camera locked, but not the location of the sun. — Joss Whedon

When I approached him a second time with the cameras rolling, Munson grabbed the microphone and suggested I perform a physical impossibility. — Jim Bouton

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

I started acting when I was 17. I started modeling when I was 13. It helps in the way that you don't get fazed by cameras too much. — Sandrine Holt

Hugh Grant, who several times has announced that he was thinking of retiring from acting, has said that he suffers from panic attacks when the cameras start rolling. — Scott Stossel

What's so fun when you shoot in a car is you get to research all the other road movies that have ever been done, and you try to figure out where do they place the cameras and how many shots can you get with your people in the car. So just doing the research on the films is so fun. — Tamra Davis

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

After a decade of profligacy, the American people are tired of politicians who talk the talk but don't walk the walk when it comes to fiscal responsibility. It's easy to get up in front of the cameras and rant against exploding deficits. What's hard is actually getting deficits under control. But that's what we must do. Like families across the country, we have to take responsibility for every dollar we spend. — Barack Obama

We live in a bizarre world - there are cameras in our house! — Nick Lachey

There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. — Susan Sontag

The hand of the painter is incurably mechanical: his technique is incurably artificial ... The camera ... is so utterly unmechanical. — George Bernard Shaw

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

Human vision is untrustworthy, subjective and selective. Camera vision is total and non - objective. — Andreas Feininger