David Watkin was one of British cinema’s top cameramen and greatest characters. He would have liked to have been a musician, but his musical ambitions got no support from his family, which had long connections with the railways. He worked for the newly nationalised British Railways, drifted into film-making as a messenger and camera assistant in its film section and eventually went on to win an Oscar for best cinematography for the luscious African landscape photography in Out of Africa (1985).

The film brought him a slew of prizes, including a British Academy Award, though he accumulated no fewer than eight other Bafta nominations. He worked with such celebrated names as the Beatles, Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn. He believed in filming scenes as simply as possible. Asked for a slogan for T-shirts at a film festival in Poland, where he was receiving a lifetime achievement award in 2004, he suggested “One tries not to f**k it up”.

The cinematography on Out of Africa, with its wide panoramas and warm, nostalgic interiors, was not particularly typical of his work. But then his no-nonsense approach proved extremely adaptable in a career that included such classic films as The Knack (1965), Help! (1965), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), The Devils (1971), Chariots of Fire (1981), Yentl (1983), Moonstruck (1987) and Hamlet (1990), along with the acclaimed TV mini-series Jesus of Nazareth (1977).

He was so relaxed on set that he was famous within the industry for his habit of taking a nap between shots. Despite his lack of pretensions or any great artistic claims, he was an important innovator, well known for his technique of accentuating whites by reflecting light off sheets of polystyrene. He used the technique on the likes of Help! and The Devils, but it was actually developed to accentuate the whiteness of clothes in washing powder commercials that he did with Richard Lester.

Naturalism was key to Watkin’s work. He often arranged his light to come through windows, prompting one critic to compare him to Vermeer, and he developed a new lighting system for shooting at night. It employed about 200 bulbs in a unit suspended from a crane some distance from the action. It served as a single, powerful light source and solved the problem of fluctuating light when characters walk through a night scene.

His system of lights for night shooting became known as the Wendy Light, because he was gay and known to technicians as Wendy. He loved gossip and anecdotes and amused listeners with a story about how he was once walking down the street in Brighton, where he lived, when he heard someone shout “Wendy”. He turned round and said “Yes?” The stranger behind him explained that he had actually been calling to his wife. “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Watkin, “I thought you were an electrician.”

He was born into an upper middle-class family in Margate, Kent. He was related to Sir Edward Watkin, the Victorian railwayman who built and managed railways around the globe. Watkin’s father was a lawyer, working for the railways. Watkin served in the Army during the Second World War and then followed in the tracks of his antecedents.

It was a dramatic time for Britain’s railways, which were nationalised in 1948 by the new Labour Government. Watkin worked with the Southern Region Film Unit of British Railways and then as an assistant cameraman at BTF, British Transport Films, which was set up in 1949 with the intention of making documentaries about transport and travelogues promoting holiday destinations.

He worked for the company throughout the 1950s. During the 1960s he shot television commercials with several directors who would go on to achieve distinction in the field of feature films. He disliked commercials, but they were comparatively well paid. He worked on the memorable title sequence for the James Bond film Goldfinger (1964) — scenes projected on to a golden woman’s body.

But his first full feature film was the comedy The Knack, which was directed by Richard Lester and is one of the films that best capture a certain zany, spontaneous, perhaps imaginary quality of the Swinging Sixties. Rita Tushingham is the young innocent arriving in London, Michael Crawford the awkward young man she meets, and Ray Brooks is his friend who has “the knack” with women. Watkin’s giddy black and white cinematography caught the mood of the film and the times.

Watkin and Lester immediately renewed their collaboration on the Beatles movie Help!, which was seen by some as a disappointment after the first Lester-Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night (1964), but which is also now regarded a classic, capturing the madcap joie de vivre and surreal humour of the Fab Four before it all got too serious and turned sour.

Watkin and Lester would make a total of eight feature films together, including How I Won the War (1967), with John Lennon, The Bed Sitting Room (1969), with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, The Three Musketeers (1973) and Robin and Marian (1976). But Lester was just one of a number of top directors with whom Watkin worked repeatedly.

When Watkin found a director he liked he would frequently accept repeat engagements. He made six features with Tony Richardson, from The Charge of the Light Brigade in 1968 to The Hotel New Hampshire in 1984. His work with Franco Zeffirelli stretches from Jesus of Nazareth in 1977 to Tea with Mussolini in 1999.

He got on well with Barbra Streisand, the notoriously difficult producer, director and star of Yentl, though he hated her music. She tried to get him to go to her concerts, but he refused. His passion was classical music. He recently completed and self-published a second volume of memoirs, entitled Was Clara Schumann a Fag Hag? The title has nothing to do with his own life, except that it reflects his love of classical music and gossip and his perverse sense of humour.

He is survived by his civil partner, Nick Hand.

David Watkin, cinematographer, was born on March 23, 1925. He died of cancer on February 19, 2008, aged 82