Nikon cameras in the movies

jmeyer | News | 02/07/2012 12:30pm

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Our friends over at N-Photo put together a wonderful top 10 list of Nikon camera in the movies. Often appearing as uncredited extras, these Nikon SLRs have been present at some of the greatest moments in movie history.

We thought it was a pretty good list and thought we would share some of them here. As the N-Photo team asked… have they missed any out? Take a look at their top ten and then let us know in the comments – or you can let N-Photo know directly.

1. Apocalypse Now (1979)

After The Godfather Part II, this looked like it would be director Francis Ford Coppola’s $30 million folly. Instead, it’s a masterpiece. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness transposed to the Cambodian jungle, with Martin Sheen as the traumatised Willard and Brando as the deranged Kurtz, it’s a post-colonial nightmare of 20th-century proportions.

The photographer: Quoting TS Eliot and wearing – count them – four Nikon Fs around his neck, Dennis Hopper’s unnamed photojournalist is Kurtz’s resident ‘mutt’. The Nikon F was the camera of choice for professional photographers in the 1960s and early ’70s, but it’s quite possible the insane Hopper isn’t carrying any film in his. The character is actually based on what might have happened in real-life to Sean Flynn (son of Errol), the daredevil actor and photographer who was kidnapped by Vietnamese communists in 1970, never to be seen again.