Koenekamp earned Academy Award nominations for Islands in the Stream and Patton and shared a 1975 Oscar with Joe Biroc for their collaboration on The Towering Inferno. Other memorable films in his formidable body of work include The Great Bank Robbery, Billy Jack, Kansas City Bomber, The Amityville Horror, Papillion and Fun With Dick and Jane.

Study art, watch movies, shoot pictures. Shoot, shoot, shoot.

Sure, a cinematographer may tell you that he or she can shoot "any style," but Phil Parmet doesn't believe it for a second. The 30-year veteran, who got his start working on docs like Harlan County, U.S.A. and The Song Remains the Same , says that as much as one may initially attempt to diversify, most professionals inevitably wind up working with like-minded individuals.

Capture the moment. Whether it's a documentary or a feature, the toughest thing is capturing that moment.

His name may be indelibly linked to some of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters—Forrest Gump, Cast Away, Spider-Man, The Bourne Identity, Terminator 3, The Polar Express—but Don Burgess isn’t afraid to admit that it takes a great team to make a successful movie.

When you walk onto a set you have to be able to think on your feet and find a way to make it work.

by Bob Fisher

Success found Dion Beebe, ASC, ACS, early on—and has followed him ever since. As he reteams with director Rob Marshall for Memoirs of a Geisha (after earning an Oscar nod for their first film together, Chicago),MM speaks with Beebe about his start in the industry and where that's taken him.

I remember times when I worked until midnight on a music video, then slept for two hours, grabbed a cab across town and started another one at three in the morning. I'd catch a plane later that morning to shoot a commercial.

After moving to Los Angeles in the mid-1990s, cinematographer Steven Bernstein quickly amassed a body of work that includes an extraordinarily eclectic range of some 25 narrative film credits, including Jade, Murder at 1600, Scary Movie 2, Monster, Blade: Trinity and the upcoming One Night With the King and Little Man.

I don't think of myself as a cinematographer or director. I think of myself as a filmmaker. When you're working on a studio picture, you are an element of this big machine with a function that is much more defined. There are places in Europe where cinematographers are considered the country's greatest filmmakers, more so than directors. They are considered the true artists. But usually it's a collaborative effort. I feel like I have a job as the cinematographer, but I'll still direct if it's a film I'm interested in.

Athens-born cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, ASC made his first trip to the United States at the age of four when his father was the art director on John Cassavetes’ Faces. And it was Cassavetes who encouraged him to move to New York 15 years later “to shoot his next picture,” after seeing some of his still photography. Though still in the dawn of his career, Papamichael has already compiled an impressive and eclectic list of narrative credits including Phenomenon, The Million Dollar Hotel, Sideways, The Weather Man, Walk the Line and the upcoming The Pursuit of Happyness.

I think, especially these days, one of the big advantages of DV is you can just make a film. You don't have to wait two years while someone decides whether or not to finance your script. As soon as I hear someone is waiting for a financier to finance a script I'm like 'Just write the script! What have you got to lose?' It doesn't cost you anything to write, so why don't you just write the script?

It's hard to imagine Michael Winterbottom ever being bored. Since 2002 he's leapfrogged from one project to the next, releasing at least one film a year, each as different in story as it is in style. This year he has released two: First was the comedy Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, where Winterbottom teamed with Steve Coogan to adapt what's known as the "unfilmable novel." Now it's his most political film to date, the DV docudrama The Road to Guantanamo, which won him the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.

In terms of progressing either as a technician or, if you like, an 'artistically-inclined technician,' as long as you keep practicing your art, it's going to get better.

For British cinematographer Giles Nuttgens, the accolades he's receiving for The Deep End must seem like a trip from the ridiculous to the sublime. Last year critics described his work on the John Travolta bomb Battlefield Earth as dark and murky. But that was last year...

Sometimes you can see better and tell a story better if you are outside a little bit.

Since lensing his first feature, Michael Almereyda¼s Another Girl, Another Planet, in 1992, cinematographer Jim Denault has become the DP of choice for some of the independent film world's most recognized talents. Now, he's teamed up with director Jim McKay (Girls Town) to help create the realistically gritty world of three young women growing up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in Our Song.

You learn to stay true to the page. No matter how hard this movie got in terms of the logistics, I focused on the script. What does this scene mean to me? What does that line mean to me?

First-time director Antony Hoffman's recently released Red Planet has got film fans wondering: is there life on Mars? And, if so, why is he searching for it in the Australian outback?

What I have learned from my filmmaking experience is to trust my instincts.

Finnish director Renny Harlin has been actively making big-budget, action films in the U.S. since the mid-1980s, when he made a splash with the high-profile sequels A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Warriors and Die Hard 2: Die Harder.