The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.
I look at the camera as sort of a missing link between motion picture photography and still photography.
I wanted to be a movie director. I was just obsessed with watching movies and camera shots and directors. I read autobiographies and stuff of directors.
I like to work my camera as if it were a musical instrument.
I'm working 2 days a week right now, narration usually on Wed., and host on camera on Friday.
I wanted 'Night of the Living Dead' to look naturalistic, but we weren't able to do it because we were shooting with a blimped 35mm camera, which is automatically static.
Acting's all about the confidence you exude, especially on film. I mean, nervousness isn't attractive in anyone, but a film camera will seek it out and punish you.
Camera 1.0 was film. Camera 2.0 was digital. 3.0 is a light-field camera that opens all these new possibilities for your picture taking.
It is never easy to face the camera, especially for the newcomers.
My dad and I used to shoot little one-stop animations on an old 8mm film camera when I was no more than 7 or 8, and when he was away at work, I would keep shooting nonsensical, short animated films using 'Star Wars' figures or Smurfs - depended what the narrative was.
If I am at a party, I want to be at the party. Too many photographers use the camera to avoid participating in things. They become professional observers.
People obsess about casting and representation, but really, all the real work is behind the camera. Casting an Asian American into a bad role where they're shoehorned into these stereotypes is worse than not having cast them at all.
'Days of Our Lives' was an insane schedule. You're doing a whole one-hour show in a day. You do a very cursory run-through with the director telling you where you're going to be standing, then you do a quick rehearsal on camera and you shoot it.
Eight years ago, if I wanted to do a YouTube video, I broke out my camera and filmed everything myself and learned how to edit and kind of become a one-woman studio. But we're living in an era now, thanks to ICON, where any creator who is online, they can create in their own space.
Andy was not a director and not a writer. He operated the camera a little bit, and he wasn't even so good at that.
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
Because I come from that old-school optics environment, I know stuff about depth of field and camera movement and things that are not necessarily a part of the curriculum for people who started on a box and have never done anything that wasn't on a box.
The digital camera takes photographs in practically no light: it will dig out the least bit of light available. I was amazed to see the results of photographs that I wouldn't take ordinarily. That's the advantage of digital photography.
For me, being a complete artist means not necessarily just being in front of the camera, but being behind the camera or being the originator or creator of something.
Talking-head shows are just a camera, a sound guy, and then a PA writing down what you say and a producer asking you questions. And you're just supposed to rephrase the question and add a joke to it. Figuring out how to do that was super hard.
