DOP

Immediately after the film's editor gets her credit and just as the music is reaching a crescendo, the image cuts to a beach campfire scene. The camera now moves left to right in a slow tracking shot to reveal a tableau of young couples. A boy playing a harmonica (which, together with a strummed guitar, provides the scene's source music) sits near but not with a long-haired girl, who exhales a plume of cigarette smoke with the quick nervousness of an unpractised smoker.

The credit for the film's director of photography - Bill Butler - appears as the camera tracks past a kissing couple silhouetted against the orange flames of the fire. The scene is lit like one of those Dutch paintings illuminated by candlelight. The faces of the people sitting in the background glow in the warm amber light whilst the couples in the foreground are in dark silhouette. As DOP (or DP, if you prefer),Butler would have had responsibility for lighting this scene and for burnishing the image with a slightly soft focus. He had worked with Spielberg twice before (including the 1972 TV movie Something Evil) and his work on Jaws would be bookended by contributions to two other iconic Seventies movies - The Conversation in 1974 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1976.

It was Butler who had the idea of shooting most of the Orca scenes with a hand-held camera - not to give it a shaky cinema-verite look, but to use the camera operator's body to counteract the pitch and roll of the ocean. The camera operator in this case being Michael Chapman, who would go on to work as DOP on Raging Bull. There were other technical challenges to be faced: filming day-for-night scenes on and under the water, using a specially constructed waterproof box to house the camera for the unnerving shots at water level, and, of course, making sure that the shark appeared in the frame but the mechanical equipment that operated it did not.