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| © Zack Snyder |
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There has always been a thin line between film and still photography for Hollywood phenom Zack Snyder. Director of last year's hugely popular Greco-Persian war story 300, Snyder has been taking pictures for most of his life -- inspired by the example of his mother, an artist/photographer who also planted the film seed by giving her son an 8mm movie camera when he was ten. "When I got out of college I started working as a director-cameraman for commercials," says the photographer, a graduate of Pasadena's Art Center College of Design. "I was using a Polaroid 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 pack-film camera as a way of checking exposure and previewing lighting, so I carried it with me wherever I went."
Snyder went many places, spanning the globe to make music videos and Clio-winning commercials for clients such as Jeep, Budweiser, and Titleist, and shooting Polaroids as he traveled. Why Polaroids? "I look at a photograph as something like a sand castle," he explains. "I like that it's a one-off." Snyder shoots Polaroid Type 55 black-and-white Positive/Negative film, as do many fine-art and documentary photographers, but unlike those photographers bravely throws his negative away.
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With his first feature, Dawn of the Dead (a remake of the classic zombie film), on the horizon, Snyder was reading a 2001 story in American Photo about fashion photographer Bruce Weber's use of the Littman 45 Single, a new camera designed for handheld 4x5 shooting. He bought one of the first Littmans off the line. The camera appealed to him not just because of its parallax-corrected rangefinder focusing -- it is fundamentally a re-engineered, rebuilt Polaroid 110 -- but by the bigger image it produced. "Shooting individual sheets of film was a bit of a deal, but the transition was really easy for me," says Snyder. "The camera became second nature."
Snyder has even used the camera for his commercial work, and not just for scouting purposes. One such occasion was for a CVS ad campaign he was directing; he used his Littman to shoot still portraits for the associated print advertisements. And for this job he shot color transparency film with the camera, an approach that called for especially careful metering and exposure. Though the Littman is a Polaroid by birth, it can shoot any wet-process 4x5 film or even accept a high-resolution digital back -- important considerations given Polaroid's recent decision to stop making instant films. Fuji, which already produces a variety of compatible instant films, will probably pick up the manufacturing slack, and Littman himself is angling for the license to make Type 55 Positive/Negative film.
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