Walter Mitty (Ben Stiller) is the senior photo editor at Life magazine. So his work is all about photography, and in this case, analog photography. His workplace is the photo archive, packed with filed negatives and prints. In the beginning of the story, we see him and his assistant processing a roll of developed Kodak 400TX black and white negative film on a light table, cutting and preparing it for contact printing. Then they notice that the one negative, number 25, needed for the cover of the last issue of the printed Life magazine, is missing. In a personal letter, photographer Sean O’Connell (Sean Penn) speaks of “The Quintessence of Life” in reference to the photo on the missing negative.

A hunt begins for the whereabouts of O’Connell and the negative, with the film containing the crucial clues that Walter Mitty must uncover. Only three images on the film are properly exposed, and Walter Mitty tries to find out more about them. The prominence, given to physical analog photography, in the form of the photographic negative in the movie, is remarkable. In one scene, we see the photos on the contact sheet in a close-up. At one point, the subject of one photo begins to move and the shot dissolves into a bird’s eye view of Walter sitting by the pond in front of the Time-Life Building at Rockefeller Center. During the long transition of the two shots, the features of the negative – the barriers between the images, the engraved numbers, the film perforations – lay over the next shot and gently lead us into the next scene.

The shot through the Nikon F3/T’s viewfinder that we see is a fairly realistic image of a typical focusing screen with the split image rangefinder dot in the middle, the blurred microprism doughnut, and the metering area circle around it. We don’t see the dark area at the top that displays information about the shutter speed used in the upper left and the aperture in the upper center that we would see when looking through a standard F3 viewfinder. In total, there are 23 different types of focusing screens available for the Nikon F3 cameras. Since the film is really well done in terms of effects, we can assume that the shot was reproduced completely digitally, including the snow leopard.

There is also a strong connection in the film to non-fiction photography in the real world to mention. The actual black and white photograph in which Sean O’Connell entices Walter to take a leap of faith and follow his lead was originally taken by photojournalist Marcus Bleasdale. It was published in 2009 in his photo book The Rape of a Nation, in which he looked at the impact of natural resource extraction on the Congolese population. The photo was provided by VII Photo Agency, which also provided photos by John Stanmeyer, Seamus Murphy, Ashley Gilbertson, Ed Kashi, Lynsey Addario, and Tomas van Houtryve, as noted in the credits.