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| Zack Snyder's "Littman Arabella" |
| Click photo to see more images. |
Snyder has also shot stills on the sets of his own movies, including 300 and his upcoming Watchmen, now in postproduction. You can see some of this work in the accompanying gallery, reproduced from the original positive Polaroids. Ironically, it's when he's shooting on set that Snyder is most aware of the differences between photography and film. "A movie is moments that are strung together, whereas the camera allows me to take a moment on its own terms," he explains. "It doesn't have to relate to anything else."
After Snyder wrapped up Watchmen he sent the camera back to its creator for an upgrade that turned it into a Littman VI, a more recent iteration that adds the unique, patent-pending ability to precisely adjust the parallelism of film and lens planes. "William kept it for quite a while, and I felt naked without it," says the director, who also owns a Nikon D200 digital SLR. "I hadn't realized how dependent I'd become on it." It was worth the wait, though, because in the process Littman restyled Snyder's camera into a spectacular designer model he dubbed the "Arabella." Its owner seems to be unaware of its florid name, which is more likely a reference to Richard Strauss's lyric opera than to Winston Churchill's eccentric Buddhist granddaughter.
"It's meant to evoke the Hollywood African adventure movies of the 1930s," says Littman, who accented the camera with exotic Thuja burlwood (a "noble African wood," he says) and decorated its focusing wheel with an African tribal shield. "I was going for a Johnny Weismuller-meets-Gatsby sort of thing." Snyder is less descriptive. "It's super cool, and gets a lot of attention when I'm walking around and shooting with it," he says. "And now instead of keeping it in its Pelican case I put it on my bookcase because I like to look at it." Cosmetics aside, Snyder reports that the upgrade has improved both viewfinder and focusing, and also makes the camera easier to hold securely, important given the slower shutter speeds his film speed often demands. "It was always super-reliable and pretty bulletproof," he comments. "But now it's just a little more effortless to operate."
Despite its beauty and mechanical precision, the camera is also a throwback technically and mechanically -- and that's the way Snyder likes it. "It's become my snapshot camera, so I had it with me when I was just on vacation in the Turks and Caicos," says the director, whose upcoming movie, The Last Photograph, will be about a war photographer in Afghanistan. "I was walking on the beach and using close-up diopters to shoot weird stuff in the sand, using a tape measure to set the focus. This guy walks by and says, 'You know, they've got that all figured out now, they have autofocus cameras.' And I go, 'Yeah, they want your soul too, so I think I'll stay with this.'"
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