It is difficult now to credit the atmosphere of exuberant optimism in the 1980s as Channel 4 opened its doors, with Jeremy Isaacs at the helm, and the BBC began, albeit reluctantly, to commission programming from independent production companies. This opened up a new world for film-makers with something to say, and Reality Productions, which consisted of Diane Tammes, who has died aged 78, Dee Dee Glass and Seona Robertson, was formed to work with voices and stories hitherto absent from television. The company delivered its first – and Channel 4’s 30th – programme, Pleasure Palaces, a three-part series on the heyday of cinema through memories and classic Hollywood films, in 1982, and it aired in November that year.

Diane had met Dee Dee in one of the earliest intakes to the National Film and Television School, which opened its doors in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, under the innovative Colin Young in 1971. There were no lectures: just skilled professionals for the students’ use, space to experiment and money for the making of films. Young’s graduates went on to take over the media world for some decades.

Diane was the first NFTS female camera graduate and soon after, in 1975, became the first woman accredited by the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians (now the Broadcasting, Entertainment, Cinematograph and Theatre Union). The technical grade “cameraman” became, officially, cameraperson. Though she became a director of great skill and acuity and was not above editing and sorting out sound, it was as a cinematographer that Diane excelled. She regarded herself, above all, as a craftsperson. In 1977 she shot Riddles of the Sphinx for Laura Mulvey, the feminist film theorist who coined the phrase “the male gaze”, and Peter Wollen.

The film, one of several fruitful collaborations between them, which also included Crystal Gazing (1982) and The Bad Sister (1983), employed 360-degree pans of varying widths. Diane, with a typical chuckle, told of building a platform with bits of wood and stone to house her cumbersome film camera and ancillary equipment and then of having to push and squeeze and edge it round and, simultaneously, herself round it, all the while turning a handle smoothly and keeping an eye on the frame and what was ahead of her and, crucially, not falling off.

Diane went on to shoot, with an all-woman crew, Some Women of Marrakesh (1977) for Granada’s Disappearing World strand, the first of many difficult and sometimes dangerous assignments. She was determined, tough and brave. By her own account, the only time she feared for her life was in Northern Ireland and in Bosnia, in the bad times.

Her credit list is long and covers many of the main currents and preoccupations of her times. It encompasses the series Artists at Work with Isaacs’ production company for his digital channel Artsworld, many pioneering films for Channel 4, Casualties – Homerton Hospital (1991) for Cutting Edge, for which she won a Bafta award in 1992, and Rottenrow, a film about the ground-breaking maternity hospital in the east end of Glasgow, which she and I made together, in 1994.

Diane was born in Welshpool, Powys, to Richard Bywater, a major in the Army Medical Corps, and his wife, Iris (nee Thomas), a bookbinder. After a peripatetic childhood with her sisters, Helen and Judy, during which she lived in Libya, Egypt and West Germany, and went to school for a period in Cheltenham, she moved to London in the early 1960s. She was, by day, an assistant in a photographic studio in Kensington and, in the evenings, an usherette at the Lyric theatre.

An interest in lighting brought her together with Andre Tammes. In 1963, in the teeth of parental opposition and a very cold winter, they eloped by motorbike up the A1 in the snow. They found their way to Edinburgh, where I first met Diane, who had become a stills photographer to the Scottish arts community. Giles Havergal at the Glasgow Citizens described her as the best photographer they ever had, and her work for the Lyceum, with a very young Richard Eyre, among others, is striking. She also worked with the national arts companies, and artists such as Ian Hamilton Findlay. Images she made with him are in the Tate collection.

In 1972, Diane, her marriage over and her young son, Sion, in tow, travelled to Beaconsfield for her NFTS entrance interview, all 5ft 3in of her, to be confronted with a panel of five men. Their questions ranged from “What weight are you?” – answer, “That’s irrelevant” – to “Are you strong enough to lift a camera?” Charles Stewart, one of the interviewing panel members, felt it necessary to interject that if women can carry around babies and children, they can handle a camera. Diane did both, carrying, discreetly, and giving birth to her second child, Rhiannon, daughter of Edward Tise, while a student. Later Charles became Diane’s longterm partner and father of her third child, Rosslyn; they separated in 2000.

Though essentially a private person, most at ease with the world when interpreting it through her lens, with a glass in hand she was good company. Her tenacity, imagination, skill and intelligence overcame successive obstacles of time, place and circumstance, including the lifelong chronic lung condition which finally overtook her.

She is survived by Sion, Rhiannon and Rosslyn, and three grandchildren, and by Helen and Judy.

• Diane Woodford Tammes, documentary film-maker, born 10 April 1942; died 30 May 2020