A Quote by Steve Coleman

Take your camera off automatic. You are the photographer. — © Steve Coleman
Take your camera off automatic. You are the photographer.
This is how you can tell a real photographer: mostly, a real photographer does not say 'I wish I had my camera on me right now'. Instead a real photographer pulls out her camera and takes the photograph.
When I first asked to take pictures of women at their homes, I was using my formal camera and I struggled to get the shots because I was still very much in the role of the photographer. Then the next time I had this little digital camera and their response to me would be completely different - I was a friend and I got new kinds of pictures. I was always treading a line between photographer and friend.
When you are interviewing someone, never let your camera person turn off the camera. The second you turn off the camera, they'll say the magic thing that you'd been looking for the whole interview. People want to relax after the performance is done. Don't be afraid of awkward silence. That is your friend.
What some highbrows call rapport is nothing more than a mild flirtation between photographer and the girl on the other side of the camera. Some models get so professional they can send hours flirting with the camera itself while the poor photographer is reduced to the role of spectator.
[My advice to a beginning photographer is] sit down with a pencil and paper and think about what your life is about. What you are about. Don't even take a camera into your hands before you figure that out.
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.
When the photographer is nearby, I like to say, 'Quick, get a photo of me looking into the camera,' because I'm never looking into the camera. Christopher Nolan looks into the camera, but I think most directors don't, so whenever you see a picture of a director looking at the camera, it's fake.
Your automatic creative mechanism is teleological. That is, it operates in terms of goals and end results. Once you give it a definite goal to achieve, you can depend upon its automatic guidance system to take you to that goal much better than "you" ever could by conscious thought. "You" supply the goal by thinking in terms of end results. Your automatic mechanism then supplies the means whereby.
If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.
I didn't want to be a woman photographer. That would limit me. I wanted to be a photographer who was a woman, with all the world open to my camera.
When you are a photographer, you work all the time, because your eye is the first camera.
When I was 19, I picked up an old, tiny, automatic Yashica camera and I just started shooting. We didn't have iPhones back then, we didn't even have cell phones. I loved having a camera in my hand.
What you think is fake in your head comes off as not enough on camera, a lot of times. You almost have to overdo it, in this overly, sort of Broadway, large-gestures kind of way to come off as being realistic on camera. It's strange. You almost have to act really fake to come off looking real.
You know, the Chinese don't like to be photographed because they believe that a part of their life is being taken away by the photographer. And in a way, they're right. The photographer is trying to get the prettiest moment of a life in his camera.
Now everyone's main objective of taking photographs is to have a photograph for Twitter or Facebook. I find that troubling. If you have an opportunity to meet the Dalai Lama, don't work out your camera or iPhone issues. Sit and a listen to what the man is saying, because nine times out of 10, you're not going to look at that photo. You're not going to look at the video. As a photographer, I don't carry a camera. I have my iPhone, but I don't carry a camera. I want to live.
The less friendly your relationship is on camera, the more useful it is to be friends with them off camera.
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