It is more natural to position the camera in the world space as if it was another object.

Suppose that we identify a point where the camera is located (in world space), and call it the eye point. Then we identify some other world-space point in the scene that we wish to appear in the center of our view. We'll call this point the look-at point. Next, we identify a world space vector that we wish to be oriented upwards in our final image, and this point we'll call the up-vector.

This specification allows us to specify an arbitrary camera path by changing only the eye point and leaving the look-at and up vectors untouched. Or we could pan the camera from object to object by leaving the eye-point and up-vector fixed and changing only the look-at point.