I had done a lot of rock 'n' roll photography when I was in college. I was one of many photographers who worked for The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and all of these rock 'n' roll bands.

You had to make a camera look like it's traveling at 300 mph, but you couldn't make it actually travel at 300 mph so you had to slow everything down and build devices to do that. So you were constantly engineering.

Digital imaging has untied our hands with regards to technical limitations. We no longer have to be arbiters of technology we get to participate in the interpretation of technology into creative content.

Because I come from that old-school optics environment, I know stuff about depth of field and camera movement and things that are not necessarily a part of the curriculum for people who started on a box and have never done anything that wasn't on a box.

Boy, am I glad there wasn't a fourth episode of Lord of the Rings.

As with sound, images are subjective. You and I may not see the same color red as red, but we will probably agree that the image on the screen is a digital image or film image, based on contrast, bit depth, and refresh rate.

If you understand how the real world feels and looks and sounds it is much easier to create a virtual version of the real world.

Once the image was in the digital environment, one of the problems was, we had no means to reproduce the color spectrum, grey scale, and contrast that film produces, without converting the digital file to film, evaluating it, then going back and changing the digital image.

George Lucas wanted this moving camera for all of the photography in Star Wars. He was willing to take a risk with the concepts that I advanced with regard to ways for doing that.

It's very much like filmmaking always is-you're always asked to do something that you're not sure you know how to do. So you make an educated guess as to what you think will work and you hope between that and plan B, that you can end up with a product that's really good.