Nigel Dennis Quotes

There are a thousand ways to point a camera, but really only one.

Whenever I arrive on a real location, I have to move around and work out what the best angles are going to be. When I was moving around with the lens, I discovered things that the naked eye would not have.

You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.

It's just about going out and getting the shot, so I have a great understanding of how to execute it, so that really helps me, and also having a good understanding of all the action that I'm shooting, it helps me in determining how I'm going to capture it.

If you shoot with a billion cameras, then there's no perspective. You want to use one shot at a time, so it's better to discover what that is before you shoot, rather than trying to make something in the cutting room, and then it just becomes generic.

Visual ideas combined with technology combined with personal interpretation equals photography. Each must hold it's own; if it doesn't, the thing collapses.

Which is my best picture? The one I will do tomorrow.

[Photography] remains servile to a thoughtless vision of the world... As the term snapshot suggests, photography seizes the moment and exhibits it.

Photography is 1% talent and 99% moving furniture.

Photography is not only drawing with light, though light is the indispensable agent of its being. It is modeling or sculpturing with light, to reproduce the plastic form of natural objects. It is painting with light.

A camera alone does not make a picture. To make a picture you need a camera, a photographer and above all a subject. It is the subject that determines the interest of the photograph.

I like photographers. You don't ask questions.

I'm here to make good pictures. If I don't see it, I won't touch it. I may not make a good picture, but I still gotta believe in it!

I have wanted to direct for quite some time, but I wanted to be ready and know what I am doing. I wanted to know the basics.

One thing I learnt was that you don't have to spend all day shooting: you can get it done in half an hour if you're that talented as a cameraman.

For me, it's all about having the performers feel confident in their movements and surroundings. And then I'll figure out how to photograph it afterward.

Everything is always against you when making a movie, and if you don't have a solid blueprint that the entire team can get behind and understand and then execute, then you're going to be lost on the set.

In everything I do, the aesthetics are driven by the emotion. However I can do that with a camera, whether it's a long lens or a wide lens, I'll do.

There's a lot of research and time that goes into my shoots. I spend weeks on them, even for one picture.

I love to take pictures of my food.

Sometimes I'm amazed by how much you can do as a photographer.

Photography belongs to a fraternity of its own. I was young and enthusiastic and wanted to take good pictures to show the other photographers. That, and the professional pride of convincing an editor that I was the man to go somewhere, were the most important things to me.

I was a photographer. That's how I began my career, behind the camera.

The way I work is, I always compose a shot list before I talk to anybody, including my DP. So I'll spend a couple months basically creating the movie in my head, so I have a very solid film in my head, where I know every shot, and I know what the transitions between scenes are.

I've always preferred being behind the camera.