 Today's episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Has this ever happened to you? You're watching a movie with your partner, doing everything you possibly can to try and not think about film photography, and then guess what? Some reckless character in the movie that you're watching uses a film camera, and your most primal instinct kicks in. You do the decaprio meme thing at the screen, which causes your partner, who is just trying to enjoy their evening, to roll their eyes pretty violently. It's probably happened to all of us, right? Today we're actually gonna skim through a couple popular movies and take a look at which film cameras the prop department decided to go with, because clearly I've run out of content, or just gotten lazy, I don't know, either one. Let's start with Spider-Man. Our favorite actor, Andrew here, sorry, no, I get that wrong all the time. Our favorite actor, Tom here, plays Peter Parker, who's only real character trait seems to be that he's a nerd who likes photographing women on 35mm film. And I guess he's also into being a spider or whatever else happens in the movie. Okay, so he's using a Canon F1, and yeah, it definitely doesn't look like that through the viewfinder. Also, she's not even staring at the camera technically, so I don't know what kind of shot you're looking for here, Peter. It's kind of hard to tell which model this one is. There are two Canon F1 models, if my memory serves me correct, which it rarely ever does. The original F1 that came out in the 1970s, I believe, and the Canon New F1, which came out afterwards in the 80s. The new F1 was a sort of Canon's version of, uh-oh, our ass is on fire. Nikon did some futuristic sh** with the F3, so let's reissue the F1 with our own futuristic sh**. Stuff like auto-exposure and probably some other fancy stuff that I can't remember. I think the easiest way to tell the two models apart is just by looking at the top plate, the shutter dial, to see if it has a green A for auto or automatic. Unfortunately, we never really see the camera in great detail, at least in this scene. The shot doesn't really show it too clearly, and I think the A symbol would be somewhere in here, so it's probably covered up, if it's even there. But considering how beat-the-sh** this camera looks, I'm betting it's the original F1. I love how he blacked out the Canon logo, too. Maybe you're confused, bro. That's a Leica move. I'm not sure what lens he's using. It looks like it could be a Tokina push-pull zoom of some kind. Yeah. Something like this. God damn, that is a budget lens. The F1s are probably some of the best cameras ever built by Canon. I think nowadays a lot of people prefer to go with the original F1s because they're fully mechanical and they're easier to be repaired or, you know, CLA'd if you can find somebody brave enough to do it. I've never owned one of these cameras personally, but a lot of people that I've talked to say that the film advance and the shutter sound like mechanical heaven on earth. The secret life of Walter Middy. When are you gonna take it? Sometimes I don't. If I like a moment personally, I don't like to have the distraction of the camera. Okay. Yeah. I get the point that he's trying to make, but like maybe take the photo anyway, right? I mean, it's a f***ing endangered snow leopard. So the 35mm camera that he's using in this clip is actually kind of a rare one. It's the Nikon F3T. You can actually see the emblem right here. I don't know what happened to the Nikon logo that's supposed to be right here, but I don't know, movie rights or something probably. They probably hired somebody miserable like me to paint it out in post. I used to be a visual effects artist. It's not important. I feel like we're really onto something here. You mind? I'm working. Yeah. So the F3 here was actually that camera that we were talking about a little bit earlier with Spider-Man, the camera that spurred Canon to make the Canon new F1. The Nikon F3 here is a total, you know, it's a beast of a machine. The entire Nikon F line was designed to be that and the F3 is certainly no exception. The F3T in this clip is actually the later special edition version. The T stands for titanium, of which the top plate and probably some other pieces were made out of. It supposedly made the camera lighter and more durable, but I don't know. I hear mixed reports on that. I honestly think it was probably more about just making the camera look more tight. The F3T in this movie is the raw titanium finish, you know, that sort of champagne color. Nikon also released a black finished titanium version, which came out after this one. It looks like he's got the power winder attachment on the bottom here, which beefs the crap out of this camera. It almost doubles the size and weight, but it's kind of an aesthetic. I don't know if they ever made an accompanying, you know, titanium finish power winder for this particular camera. So it kind of looks a little mismatched. Me personally, I wouldn't want to haul all that heavy ass shit around the mountains, especially including a tripod and a big ass zoom lens like he clearly has in this clip. Speaking of the lens, I don't know what lens he's using. It looks like a Nikor ED lens of some kind. You got the gold emblem up here that kind of gives it away. And yeah, ED doesn't stand for what you think it does, gentlemen. I'd be willing to bet it's a 100 to 300 maybe. Maybe this one. Nikor 120 to 300 millimeter 2.8 AFS EFL ED SR VR lens. What the fuck is up with the nomenclature on these? I don't know. It could be a 70 to 200 as well. These lenses are definitely newer, you know, more electronic. They kind of started to move away from like physical aperture dials at this point. These lenses were also built for autofocus systems, which the Nikon F3T, which was released in the 80s, did not have. I'd be a little surprised if this lens actually worked on the F3. I'm guessing the props department just put these two pieces of kit together and said, fuck it, Harry Potter, which I just learned recently is not about an overtly Harry botanist. This is the sixth movie, I believe. There's this like party scene, probably right after our main character almost gets eaten by like a dragon or something. Or maybe I'm just misremembering the movies. I'd probably want to get pretty fucked up too after living through a traumatic event like that. Take your hands off me, awful squib. Professor Sloth Holden, sir. OK, so you might miss it. There's a film camera here. So this camera is the Pentax 6.7. It's kind of hard to tell which model it could be the Pentax 6.7. It's probably not the 6.7.2. I don't think the 2 had this like crossbar thing across the top. This whole thing is definitely quite a setup for sure. The Pentax 6.7 is a huge camera because it shoots a format called 120 film. 120 film obviously is significantly larger than 35 millimeter film. So you get more resolution per photo. However, sort of the trade off is you get less photos per roll. Unless, of course, you double expose, then I guess you get infinity shots per roll. I don't think we ever really see him reloading. Probably because there'd be a lot of swearing and cursing God. The lugs for the Pentax 6.7 are on the bottom. So he'd have to take the flash unit off every time he pounds out 10 photos. So I guess we can just chalk it up to magic or, you know, some fairy tale bull. It definitely doesn't exist in real life. 6 by 7 is a very popular format on 120 film. And the Pentax 6.7 itself is a very highly regarded camera because it is one of the few SLR cameras that can do it effectively or semi effectively, at least. I don't know. I've seen a lot of these kind of the bed on photographers in the field. Probably the most famous lens for the Pentax 6.7 system is the Takamar 105 millimeter 2.4. I can't really tell if that's what lens this background character is using, but I'd be willing to bet it is. It's just kind of a standard in that kit. One cool fun fact about these lenses is that they're radioactive. I believe the amount of radioactivity is pretty nominal, but they used a thorium, I believe, in the glass. And after a while, it kind of turns the glass of the lens orange if the lens is not out in the sun every once in a while. All that really to say, who the f**k is this clown and why the s**t did he choose that camera for this party environment? Low light party shots? Go home. You're drunk, Andy Warhol. I mean, I guess he does have a flash unit on board, so maybe I'm the a** here. That, however, is not the correct shutter sound for this camera. It sounds like some sort of stock Hollywood camera sound effect. On these cameras, there's like a huge mirror inside that needs to pop up, and then the curtain needs to go to expose your film, and then the mirror has to pop down again. And because this is a big boy of a camera, that mirror slap up and slap down, it's really loud. I mean, it sounds cool to us photographers, but yeah, it would probably be pretty distracting at a party like this. Though, you know, what can I say? It is an aesthetically pleasing camera. I can only imagine it was chosen for this scene for that reason. Asteroid City. Okay. There's no way that he took that photo and it came out even remotely okay. So that camera is a little bit tricky. I believe it's a rebadged Kiev rangefinder. It's basically an Eastern European copy of a Leica. I'm guessing the prop department really liked the look of that camera, and didn't really want to risk rebadging something a little bit more known like a Leica. So they took a more economical route. It looks like it was rebadged to Mueller Schmidt, which I'm pretty certain never existed in the world of 35 millimeter cameras at least. The original Kiev logo on these cameras is kind of unique looking, is maybe the best way to describe it. I don't know, it's got that kind of like curly design. I can see why they decided to redesign it for the movie. It also looks like it has a Swiss flag on it. So maybe it's some sort of Alpa style rangefinder alternate universe crossover. I don't know. Up top here is the light meter, I'm guessing, which it seems like the character in this movie never uses because the cover stays on it the entire time. That could be an oversight or perhaps a smart character decision on the movie's part. If this character is supposed to be a seasoned photographer, he can likely judge the amount of light by eye or perhaps the sunny 16 rule and that would negate the need to use a light meter. This scene in particular is kind of funny to me because if I recall, he shows the photo later on in the movie and there's clearly some sort of bright ass off-camera flash, which wasn't actually there when he took the original photo. Unless he's using like clean ass T-Max 25,000 ISO black and white film that doesn't exist in real life, I guess we can just chalk it up to magical movie bullshit. I'm not sure which lens he's using. It looks like a 50 mil f2 and it says combat lens on it, which if I remember correctly was pretty much in line with his character. So it's kind of cool to see that through line. You can still get these Kievs pretty easily on eBay. I think when the movie came out, some people were buying these up, rebadging them to match the movie prop and then reselling them. So that's kind of interesting. The Kiev is a rangefinder camera, so it uses two separate windows to find focus. I remember a lot of people in the community talking about one scene in particular in this movie. When he takes a photo, his finger is covering one of the two rangefinder windows. So maybe, I don't know, he's just a baller who doesn't need to focus. I mean, I guess if he's shooting T-Max 25,000, he can probably just close down to f22 and everything will be in focus. I'd be very surprised if you can actually find a copy of these Kievs nowadays that have a working light meter, much less an accurate one. Still though, you know, cool cameras. It was an interesting choice for this movie. The Lost World Jurassic Park. This is, this is magnificent. This has to be, it's got to be paid promotion or something, right? I can only really recognize one of the two cameras. They're both Nikon. The big one is the, without a tout, the Nikon F5. Probably one of the best 35 millimeter cameras ever made. I feel like I've said that a couple times in this video. You'd be kind of hard-pressed to find a more specced out camera than that, honestly. These F5s were made sort of on the brink of digital, so they have a lot of crossover features, like 1,800th of a second, which on film is kind of insane. The F5 also famously has something called matrix metering, which I don't think anyone really understands how it works, but it's highly regarded and it sounds pretty cool. The F5 can also shoot like eight frames a second or something, which is really crazy when you consider its film and it's physically moving the film through the exposure chamber. Also, also it has a self-diagnosing shutter. That is the craziest part to me. I don't know what Nikon engineers were smoking back in the day to pack all this stuff into one camera, but must have been some good sh**. I mean, if you're going to photograph big-ass, wild dinosaurs on 35 millimeter film, then yeah, this is probably the camera to use. It's rugged to the nth degree. It could probably survive a dinosaur stampede, no problem. The F5 was just built the last. A little fun fact about this camera. I remember there was a famous Canon photographer who came out and publicly said that the Nikon F5 is the best camera in the world, so he probably got his ass fired. It's kind of hard to tell from the movie, but it looks like she's using a 50 millimeter lens of some kind. I would guess a 1.4 based on the front diameter of that thing. I could be totally wrong though. I don't think that's the correct shutter sound. I had a Nikon F5 for a little bit, and if I recall, the film advance was so quick you couldn't even hear the electronic whir. It just snapped and was like ready to go again. There's a story beat here where her camera, I guess, malfunctions or something and it pisses off the dinosaurs. I find it kind of hard to believe a Nikon F5 would do that in the first place, much less make that much noise in the process, but I suppose anything is possible. If this was product placement, I'm kind of surprised Nikon would sign off on this. You know what? Maybe it's just rewinding the film. It's the end of the role. I still don't really remember it ever being that loud in real life though. So corny. Kong Skull Island. This is a... interesting. It's a hell of a setup, for sure. Anyway, in this movie, Brie Larson is playing a wartime photographer or anti-war time photographer as she says earlier in the movie. It looks to me like she's using a Leica M3 with rangefinder goggles. The Leica M3, if that's what it is, is a great choice. It's a beautiful camera and probably one of the best feeling cameras out there, if you ask me personally. Up top, this Leica has the usual, I think it's the MC light meter or maybe it's the MR. The standard F3 did not ship with an internal light meter, so if you wanted to have that feature, you needed to buy an auxiliary light meter to put on top of the camera. The M3 is famous because it's the first of the Leica M line that still goes to this day and this one, I believe, came out in the 50s. The camera looks a little bit different because she has something called rangefinder goggles on the front of it here. The only frame line that was available for the Leica M3 when it was launched was the 50 millimeter frame line. So these rangefinder goggles were kind of a workaround for photographers who wanted to use wider lenses than 50 millimeter like the 35 millimeter 3.5 Sumeran that she's using in this movie. If this movie does take place in the 70s, I don't know why she's not using a newer Leica camera that has the correct frame lines. I think the M2 and the M4 were already out at that point, so I don't know, whatever. It looks cool. The camera here is a really nice brown leather finish as well. That definitely was not standard issue. The most dangerous places are always the most beautiful. I'm trying to take a long exposure photograph, but my flashlight broke. Yeah, this scene just kind of bugs me a little bit because she shot the, you know, colorful otherworldly Aurora Borealis on black and white foam. I guess it's not a huge crime. Personally, I would have just shot color. Apocalypse Now. This is definitely one of my favorite movies of all time. The scene we're going to be looking at takes place at the end. The boat crew that we've been following, the entire movie rolls up to curtsis compound at the end of the Nung River. And there's this crazy American photo journalist there with a bunch of cameras kind of racked up on him. This character is played by Dennis Hopper, who is something of a photographer himself from what I hear. In the movie, it looks like he's packing four cameras at all times. Crazy move. There's something happening out here, man. It looks like they're all Nikons. It's probably the original Nikon F, as that was a very popular choice amongst Vietnam war photographers at the time, especially because one of those cameras famously stopped a bullet. These are single lens reflex cameras. The Nikon F shown here is the first in Nikon's line of F cameras that eventually ended with the Nikon F6. Four cameras. That's the thing. I guess I can see why maybe it's a good strategy here. I guess if nothing else, if you find yourself in the middle of it, I guess you could say, and you run out of film, you can just switch to a different camera that still has film left on the on the roll. Me personally, I'd probably put color negative in one, black and white in the other, and then maybe like a color positive film in the third one, something like Kodachrome probably. And then I guess on the fourth camera, I'd just put a, maybe a longer lens on it from when the situation called for it. I'd probably ever personally carry four SLRs on my pack like that, especially if one had that bulky and heavy power winder grip attached at the bottom. Every time I watch this movie, I'm always kind of half concerned about all the Nikons on him just bashing into each other. But then I remember, oh yeah, it's the Nikon F. If it can survive the Vietnam War, it can surely survive whatever crazy antics Dennis Hopper was up to on set. And it can be mean, and it can be right. He's fighting the war. He's a great man. I've never actually owned a Nikon F, but I would imagine that's probably the correct shutter sound. Sounds accurate to me. Oppenheimer. Yeah, I doubt this guy right here got the photo. You are way too close dog, unless you wanted to take a photo of his shoulder, but then I guess the bells would need to be racked out quite a bit to even be in focus. There's this brief scene here where Killian Murphy's Oppenheimer walks through this crowded hallway of press photographers and they're all shooting these like old timey looking cameras. I can't really see any specifics, but these are likely graphics, speed graphics in both 4x5 and 2x3, if I had to guess. These were popular amongst press photographers of the time because 4x5 and 2x3 are both technically large format. So the resolution on these photos is absolutely bananas. And thus, newspaper outlets could, you know, crop in or adjust to their heart's content and the details would still hold up. Especially when the, I guess, final output was printed in low quality ink in a newspaper. Though I can't really tell, but if you look kind of closely, it doesn't really seem like these cameras have actual 4x5 sheet holders in the back of them. So they aren't actually shooting anything. I think a lot of these press photographers back in the day use something called the graphmatic back. Instead of two shots on either side of the sheet film holder, you can actually get six shots. So that made it a lot easier and quicker, which is what press photography is all about, right? This guy is definitely using a crapload of front tilt on this camera. Really going for that tilt shift depth of field effect, I guess. He's probably the only real artist here. Interestingly, this guy over here is using a twin lens reflex camera. It's hard to tell which one exactly, but maybe not the best choice camera-wise. If you only have a few seconds to grab the shot, like it seems here, focusing isn't what I'd call super fast on those. So I don't know. Maybe he pre-focused, closed down, popped the flash and hoped for the best. This lady back here actually goes behind our main character and probably got a pretty cool photo. A silhouette maybe of Oppenheimer putting on his hat to see if press photographers. Or, yeah, you know. It's a movie, so probably just a bunch of stressed out on set people and a big-ass IMAX camera. Anyway, before we wrap up this video, I'd like to take a quick moment to thank today's sponsor, Squarespace for their continued support. Let's face it, your friends and family probably constantly see you out and about with a camera in your hands. But maybe you rarely actually get to see your work for themselves. Why not present it in the best light possible with a portfolio through Squarespace. Squarespace is an all-in-one that gives you the reins to build a website that surpasses even your wildest dreams. I've been using Squarespace for years now to host my own photography portfolio and I just completed a new page of work dedicated to all my shots taken for a commissioned project. 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If you liked this video and you want me to do more you can always submit some suggestions in the comments for, you know, the next round. Otherwise, we can all just let this video fade into oblivion. Either way, just try and work on containing yourself when you see a film camera on screen. I know that it's hard but we'll get through this together.