Cinematographer

A cinematographer is one photographing with a motion picture camera (the art and science of which is known as cinematography). The title is generally equivalent to director of photography (DP or DoP), used to designate a chief over the camera and lighting crews working on a film, responsible for achieving artistic and technical decisions related to the image. The term cinematographer has been a point of contention for some time now; some professionals insist that it only applies when the director of photography and camera operator are the same person, although this is far from being uniformly the case. To most, cinematographer and director of photography are interchangeable terms. Sometimes, however, the term director of photography can refer to the person who supervises the photography in a videotaped production. For example, Larry Boelens's credit on the Mikhail Baryshnikov Nutcracker was "director of photography", although the production was shot on video.