Lucien Ballard A.S.C. (May 6, 1904 – October 1, 1988) was an American cinematographer. He worked on more than 130 films during his 50-year career, collaborating multiple times with directors including Josef von Sternberg, John Brahm, Henry Hathaway, Budd Boetticher, Raoul Walsh, Sam Peckinpah and Tom Gries. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography for The Caretakers (1963).

Ballard was born in Miami, Oklahoma in 1904. His mother Ada was Cherokee and Lucien is listed on the Dawes Rolls as 1/16th Cherokee by Blood. He attended the University of Oklahoma and the University of Pennsylvania and after graduating, he became a surveyor.

Ballard began working on films at Paramount Studios in 1929 after dating a script woman there. He later joked in an interview that it was a three-day party at the home of actress Clara Bow that convinced him "this is the business for me". He began his career loading trucks at Paramount and trained to be a camera assistant. Much of his time was spent loading film magazines into cameras, as The International Photographer reported in 1929: "Al Micklin and Lucien Ballard have just completed an estimate that, were all the Eastman film they have loaded and all the DuPont film they have loaded, be stretched out in two parallel lines between Hollywood and Yokohama, it would be fogged."

Lucien Ballard was taken on as an assistant to Lee Garmes on Josef von Sternberg's Morocco (1930). Von Sternberg allowed him credit as a second cameraman on The Devil is a Woman (1935), and the two shared a Venice Film Festival award for Best Cinematography in 1935. Von Sternberg promoted him to director of photography on Crime and Punishment (1935) and The King Steps Out (1936), based on the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, both at Columbia Pictures. "Ballard's meteoric rise to fame as an ace cameraman is breathtaking," wrote technical columnist Herbert Aller in 1935. "For about six years he was an assistant, then suddenly a second cameraman, and within a short time thereafter a first cameraman. His technical and artistic schooling is too well known to record in this space."

Director Von Sternberg left Columbia after only two pictures, but Lucien Ballard stayed with the company and became a valuable member of the staff. After filming Dorothy Arzner's Craig's Wife he took assignments for the studio's "B" features such as The Devil's Playground (1937), Penitentiary (1938), and The Lone Wolf in Paris (1938). He also lent his professionalism to Columbia's Charles Starrett westerns and even its two-reel comedies, starring The Three Stooges, Charley Chase, Andy Clyde, and Harry Langdon. In an interview with Leonard Maltin, he said he enjoyed working on the shorts because they gave him the freedom to experiment with different lenses and filters, which likely would not have been permitted on features. Ballard left Columbia in 1940.

Ballard filmed Let Us Live! (1939) for John Brahm and made more films with him including Wild Geese Calling (1941) and The Lodger (1944). On the set of The Lodger, Ballard met and then married actress Merle Oberon; they remained married from 1945 until 1949. He photographed four more of her films – This Love of Ours (1945), Temptation (1946), Night Song (1948), Berlin Express (1948). She was involved in a near-fatal car crash in London, and sustained facial scarring. Ballard invented a special light for Oberon's benefit: the invention, mounted by the side of the camera, provided direct light onto a subject's face while reducing the appearance of blemishes and wrinkles. Named the "catch light" (informally the "Obie", short for "Oberon"), the device became widely used in the film industry.

In 1941's Howard Hughes film The Outlaw, Hughes cast Jane Russell in the lead and had numerous shots of her cleavage, which got the attention of the Hollywood censors. The film was shot in 1940 and 1941 but took five years to be released to selected theaters. Ballard was the camera man for the screen tests, did some of the second unit work for director Howard Hawks, and assisted cinematographer Gregg Toland on the first unit crew. He also filmed Laura (1944) for Rouben Mamoulian until Otto Preminger took over as director.

In 1930 Ballard had also worked with assistant director Henry Hathaway. This relationship with Hathaway came back to benefit Ballard when Hathaway himself became a director. They worked together on five films, including Diplomatic Courier (1952), Prince Valiant (1954), The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), Nevada Smith (1966), and True Grit (1969). The last, because of the natural beauty of southwestern Colorado, garnered Ballard acclaim among his peers. He also worked on a segment of O. Henry's Full House (1952) with him.