who is the best DP

[Ibrahim Abdulkarim]

surely if the question was who is the worst dp the answer would be me. and what makes a DP good? is it whomever creates the best image or about the level of difficulty ?
i dont know about you but sometimes i will go watch a movie just simply to see the cinematography

my list goes as follows

1. Wally Pfister

2. Anthony Dod Mantle

3. Daniel Mindel

please share and say why. lets discuss

[Kwan Khan]

Roger Deakins (The Shawshank Redemption)

John Toll (Braveheart)

[Ibrahim Abdulkarim]

Roger Deakins (The Shawshank Redemption)

No Country For Old Men is one of my favorite movies. it not having a soundtrack made you pay more attention to the film and its cinematography. i a big fan of his work

[Brad Webb]

Personally I've always thought that Conrad Hall was the best ever, with Greg Toland a very close 2nd.

If you did a poll and let everyone vote for their top 3-5 I'm pretty certain Roger Deakins would win that.

I don't know about best, but here are my 10 favorites, in no particular order:

Anothony Dod Mantle
Robert Richardson
Dion Beebe
Roger Deakins
Emmanuel Lubezki
Matthew Libatique
Wally Pfister
David Mullen
Mark Toia
Christopher Probst

[Shervin Mandgaryan]

My 7 favorites. No order.

Amir Mokri
Darius Khondji
Dariusz Wolski
Wally Pfister
Christopher Doyle
Emmanuel Lubezki
Janusz Kaminski

[PatrickFaith]

It's really hard to have a perspective on contemporaries, but from a viewpoint of who I study the most:

Kazuo Miyagawa has to rank up there. I study his camera moves in detail ... like step frame through things. Also he's one of those old school guys that has a magical touch with camera movement(I really like how he jiggles the camera, and his dolly moves are the coolest). [Ugetsu is to me his best movie, I like Roshomon but I don't get into the plot of most of his movies, i actually watch them more for technique]

Gunnar Fischer is who I probably study more then anyone else. [ Wild Strawberries I love, also the Magician , Summer with Monica ... he has a huge body of work]

[BigLu]

Only 1 clear cut winner. Conrad L. Hall

Its proven these are amongst the best.

Maz Makhani

El Chivo

Caleb Deschanel

Michael Ballhaus

John Mathieson

Deakins, Phister, Schwartzman and Cronenweth are kinda givens.

[Nils J. Nesse]

Emmanuel Lubezki.

[Tom Lowe]

Lubezki
Toll
Deakins
Doyle

[David Mullen ASC]

When I was a teenager in the late 1970's, it was two cinematographers that got me interested in cinematography: Geoffrey Unsworth and Vilmos Zsigmond. "2001" was the film that transitioned my interests from science-fiction films to filmmaking. I moved from the Mojave Desert to the Washington D.C. suburbs in the middle of high school, and having no friends, I spent a lot of time at the Air & Space Museum that summer and picked up a copy in their gift shop of "The Making of 2001", which had almost 100 pages of illustrations in it. I read that book so many times that the binding fell apart. Unsworth shot that movie, and around the time I read that book, I saw "Superman: The Movie", which was dedicated before the opening credits to the memory of Unsworth, who had passed away just a few weeks into shooting "Tess" for Polanski. All the tributes that poured out in praise of Unsworth as a cinematographer and a collaborator made a big impression on me.

The other turning point was seeing "Close Encounters", which I saw in 1977, the same year I saw "2001" (when it first aired on national TV). Both Zsigmond and Unsworth were big into smoke and diffusion filters, and bright lights pointed into the lens. I got a Fog Filter for my Super-8 camera and started shooting everything with it.

Then in college, I discovered David Lean, more Kubrick, Kurosawa, Bergman, and Hitchcock -- and their cinematographers. I fell in love with British cinematography by Freddie Young, Freddie Francis, John Alcott, Ozzie Morris, David Watkin, Alex Thomson, etc. I also saw "Apocalypse Now" and "Reds" right when I began college and became a huge fan of Storaro. Soon after that, I discovered Conrad Hall, Gordon Willis, Jordan Cronenweth, Haskell Wexler, etc. sort of working my way backwards through 70's cinema. Allen Daviau was also a big influence since this was the time of his collaboration with Spielberg (I've been waiting months for the "Empire of the Sun" blu-ray to come out.) Caleb Deschanel too because of "The Black Stallion", The Right Stuff" and "The Natural".

The next excitement came, for me, when Robert Richardson & Oliver Stone started making their big-budget movies - I still rewatch "JFK" almost on a regular basis. I actually carry the blu-ray around with me when I travel from job to job for a quick inspiration fix.

So today, my heroes are still Unsworth, Zsigmond, Storaro, Hall, Richardson -- joined now by Deakins, Lubezski, Kaminski. I'm sure I'm skipping a few...

And this doesn't touch on my interest in classic cinema and those great cinematographers, besides Freddie Young -- people like Jack Cardiff, Leon Shamroy, Gregg Toland, George Barnes, John Alton, Robert Krasker, Arthur Miller, etc.

I've always been caught between two movements, two types of cinematographers: the realists/naturalists and expressivists/mannerists/abstractionists. Of course many of the great ones combine elements of both, but often tend to favor one approach more than the other. Often there is a certain clarity of image in the realists and the breaking up of the image with the expressive ones, almost like Impressionists or Post-Impressionists. Or you could say that in photographic terms, the photo-realists and the pictorialists.