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The first female DPs that I was aware of were Ellen Kuras, Mandy Walker, Nancy Schreiber, Amy Vincent, Sandi Sissel, Maryse Alberti and Tami Reiker. You look for a role model as somebody who looks like yourself and is doing what you want to do; they were the handful.
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It would be naive to say that you could make a movie on film for the same price you can digitally.
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For me, it's always been about the work - it wasn't about, 'Let's go break some ceilings.' I just wanted to tell an important story and do the best work I can. Everything else is secondary.
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I was probably five when I first picked up a camera. My mom had an Olympus OM-10 that she carried around to document our family photos. And I just always loved it.
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I did photography in summer camp; I did it in high school. The only hard decision I've had to make was whether to go towards photo or film. And I ultimately realized that the type of photo I was interested in was actually photojournalism. And it's a very individualist career, whereas film is a very team-driven medium. So that's why I chose film.
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It's always a challenge to shoot a period film and not have it look like you hit the tea stain button in post.
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My dad, before he passed away, never understood what I did. What I say is that I'm responsible for translating the director's vision, hopefully turning an idea into something people can connect to and relate to.
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For me, I just like new challenges.
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I came up in photography, and Dust Bowl-era photography is a lot of the reason that I got behind the camera in the first place.
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Documentaries are inherently instinctual; you're constantly moment to moment, determining what the best place for the camera is to tell the story, usually in service of natural lighting.
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My wife jokes that any time I want to take a picture of her, it has nothing to do with her - it's just because the light is really nice. She's usually right. I definitely am somebody who notices the way the light skips off the floor.
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I might be one of the very few people in this industry who doesn't have a 'me too' story.
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Cinematography speaks to everything that women do inherently well: It's multitasking, it's empathy, and it's channeling visuals into human emotion.
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My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was four. And she was re-diagnosed when I was seven or eight, and again when I was 13, and my dad was very unhealthy, too. I was living on the edge of mortality my entire childhood.
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I kind of grew up with a camera in my hand.
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I'll never know what happens behind closed doors or why I don't get hired for things.
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The best kind of entertainment is the kind that also makes you question something or think outside the box or live another life. Those are the stories that I'm drawn to.
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I pour my blood, sweat, and tears into a movie. What I always look for is a message and a social consciousness: a relevance to what's happening in our world.
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I think there's this assumption that everybody would rather be a director, and I don't know that that's the case for me, so we'll see.
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My experience - I'll never know what happens behind closed doors or why I don't get hired for something, but I've never had an experience that made me feel any less than.
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You just sort of get used to being one of the only women on set, so it's really refreshing to start to enter a time when that's not the case anymore.
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Photos have the real task of bringing exposure to places that we otherwise don't have much awareness of.
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When I was studying photography, I became interested in conflict photojournalism, and that got me interested in lighting. Then I realized there was this amazing thing called cinematography where you could kind of tell more complete stories photographing for film. So I ended up going to AFI grad school for that.
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Having a family is a compromise on some level, but it's so incredibly worth it. It actually informs the work that I do as a DP.