 Yo, what up welcome back to another episode. I'm Jason aka your boy grainy days of the vape god and today We're gonna be taking a look at some of my favorites in the world of film photography Today's episode is sponsored by Squarespace Let's start off this year with a curveball and do favorite Instagram account first cuz you always want to keep your enemies guessing now You guys know me mr. Long tan and not that handsome be may also know that I'm obsessed with making my own photographs look like paintings Lately I've been pretty obsessed with the Instagram account at dark gloomy art the name pretty much speaks for itself You're gonna get a dark subject matter and gloomy overall looks from the past couple of centuries like this one titled theater on fire Painted in 1809 by adraham peter or pether I don't know it looks an awful lot like that scene from skyfall in the goblet of James Bond or whatever that movie was called But what exactly are we supposed to do with this? What can we pull from these paintings and apply to our own photography? Well, what do all these paintings have in common besides a worrisome amount of love for death a lot like my ass They are all pretty flat in profile on a lot of them There's no clear white point and there's no clear black point obviously paintings aren't really bound by the same laws that Photography is and painters don't really give a shit about how dope your camera is Unfortunately paintings can easily fill in detail anywhere they want where photographs might have blown out highlights or loss of detail in the Shadows due to light existing outside of your exposures dynamic range But as we scroll through our new favorite Instagram account We might also notice that some painters just fall off the shadows anyway our boy Frederick Remington painted this banger in 1901 entitled the old stagecoach of the planes and he probably said to himself I'm not filling in those shadows probably because he didn't have time for that as he was constantly getting laid now I don't know about you, but I've shot a fair bit of underexposed film and I'm starting to think maybe I'm not very good at this Whole photography thing after all but I'm also starting to see the appeal of shadow detail fall off Especially on photographic film because typically it's harsh warm and gives the photo that faded look and as Tiger once said about getting The faded look on film. It's super McNasty. Here's an example I love this shot, but the tree details in the foreground are clearly lost obviously I didn't plan for that But maybe there's something to interpreting your color negative film photos a bit flatter and doing away with a sharp black and white point Anyway, that's what I've been doing That's how I've been interpreting my photos lately and I feel like it's inching me ever so closer to that painting aesthetic I've been looking at it as my own personal photographic renaissance except that it's mostly photographs of landscapes and not naked dudes Yeah, it's trendy being in pictures who think there's something rule about film that has been totally utterly superseded by technology Favorite camera it's got to be the you she could T4 as far as cameras go I really think this camera is a standout performer and that's coming from somebody who's used a lot of cameras over the years because as the Kids say my money don't wiggle wiggle it folds Which I think is a direct translation to I make a lot of drunk eBay purchases T4 And I have had what many of my therapists call a turbulent relationship, but man do I love the photos that I get out of it? Let's be honest though. It's the lens the camera body itself might as well be a stuffed husk of cow shit I recently put a roll through this of Kodak gold But don't wet your pants in excitement It's just the 35 millimeter version and the shots are beautifully warm and soft the brown tones really came through in the Corner haziness of the lens is somehow my favorite part I really wasn't expecting much from these shots, but it was very overwhelmed with how they turned out When I first bought the shega T4 I put several rolls through it and thought to myself. I don't know if this cameras for me I'm not a monogamous one-camera kind of guy, but then I took the T4 on a road trip along route 66 and the game forever changed I started to see the light of the T4. It didn't ask to be born this way It just is it's kind of like being incredibly handsome and getting constantly hit on by people trust me I wouldn't know but then that wretched day came and the T4 fell upside down out of the case It was in and body slam the pavement right there before my very eyes cracking the shell open In the days that followed I started thinking maybe photography isn't for me after all Maybe it's time I moved to a tiny cottage in the countryside and live out my remaining days with a Simpler hobby like swallowing commemorative pennies and rating them from 1 to 10. Anyway ideal lifestyles aside I have had a lot of ups and downs with this camera But I have been shooting with it a lot lately and couldn't be happier Which probably means that a downswing is coming so I guess be prepared for that It's nothing There's nothing nice about film great the only one use it has is to give your photographs an illusion of authenticity In a world where a lot of film YouTube is just blatant ass-slappy Reproductions of itself or a graveyard of awesome channels abandoned lately I found it pretty refreshing to binge watch a bunch of videos by the channel Temmie Lawson. Hi My name is Temmie Lawson. I am an art director and a photographer currently based in Dallas, Texas Temmie's work is a pretty interesting take on portraiture and Experimenting with film throw in the fact that she obviously knows how to shoot and edit the out of a video and I was instantly hooked She seems to do a lot of high production value on location type videos Which really makes her work stand out But that's probably because I'm a coward who has deep-seated fears about speaking in public that rude all the way back to high school When I got pants to graduation I believe I found her channel when I was looking up ultra max reviews and was instantly drawn in by her Breakdowns not only of the shoot but of the characteristics of the film stocks Especially when I was compared to gold her before and after edits to also give us a good idea of kind of what's happening on the back end Color-wise she recently made a video about shooting Fuji color 100 Which I thought was a standout performer mostly because it made me want to shoot the film stock myself And I think that's a sign of a job well done in a video So if you're absolutely tired of watching people try to cook a raw chicken by slapping the out of it 20,000 times that maybe consider subscribing to Temmie Lawson So for my favorite film stock I was definitely gonna say Kodak gold because it's now in 120 and That's amazing But after some deep soul-searching on a long walk aka doing a shitload of nitrous and waking up naked in a cave I came to a stark realization Ilford HP 5 is actually the goat Especially when it's pushed to stops if I start a change.org petition to just call it the afternoon Matt Daddy Day special Who's down to sign it anyway? I've been lighting that up all year because I'm absolutely over the moon impressed with how it performs almost as impressed as my Girlfriend Monica was when I whole mouthed turkey leg and dry suck the meat off the bone on our very first date The best part about shooting HP 5 2 stops is that you are shooting in an ISO of about 1600 which is incredibly high for film photography But if that means I can shoot more comfortably at sunset and blue hour then great granted It's black and white and you'll trade those gorgeous sunset tones for photos that look like they just came out of the great Depression, but you get what I mean. It's nice having the flexibility to shoot in low light It's kind of interesting to me that I'm moving in this direction of hyper contrasty black and white But then also flatter color negative. Maybe I just don't know what I like and should shut the fuck up I think to me stark contrasty black and white reminds me of some early Edward Hopper sketches and etchings as he was living in Paris Probably eating snails and croissants Saluting the Eiffel Tower or whatever they do over there It was a time where he's still trying to figure out his artistic direction He would also rough out his final paintings as contrasty drafts And I think HP 5 with its rough 5 o'clock shadow grain matches that aesthetic pretty closely Plus if I just add a little descriptor text next to it, it makes these shots look classy as f*** Anyway, thanks for joining me on my daily Edward Hopper spank sesh I guess what I'm getting at is that HP 5 is a really tight film stock Whether you shoot it at box speed or push it two stops if you like a lot of grain then look no further All right, I'll be honest here I have not been taken in my fair share of photo books this year this year might be the last year I do this category. I don't know. I like flipping through them, but they're just not really my cup of Nonlethal amounts of poison that I drink daily to become immune over time You know what I mean? That being said, I do want to give a shout out to a photo book that I thought did something super creative A systematic red scale review by Lena Shack It's basically kind of like a farmer's almanac except instead of planting your moist seed and old mother earth It's a compendium of red-scaled film stocks. What does it mean to red scale a film stock in very simple terms? It's basically just shooting your film backwards. It's flipping your film over and shooting from the back to the front Which is coincidentally also how I wipe. Yeah, I've started wiping again. Let's not make a big deal out of it It's called red scale because typically the film turns out quite red So basically what Lena did is she went through the manual process of Reversing every film stock she could get her hands on and then putting them all together into a book with each Samples she included is still of what the film stock looks like normally and then the exposure values associated with her red-scaled samples It's all pretty impressive how she managed to keep track of everything and compile it so effectively Especially compared to my own latest accomplishments, which is mostly just falling asleep on the toilet for anyone That's interested in red scaling film as I am this book is the perfect starting point to figure out Which film looks the wildest and go from there. I actually think ectochrome looks the coolest But man, it would be hard to justify those prices just to blow out those ectotones with fiery angry rageful vengeance red Anyway on a lighter note I'd like to take a quick moment and thank today's sponsor is Squarespace Squarespace is an all-in-one website building platform that allows you to build the internet destination of your dreams with its simple And easy to work with user interface I recently did a complete makeover of my own website and consolidated my many pages of photo galleries down to two pages of Just my favorite work Squarespace makes it easy to pick and choose what photos make the cut as well as how you'd like to display them with hundreds of Professionally designed template options I was even able to simply hide my previous pages in case I wanted to come back someday and explore that route of Organization further plus there are no downloads plugins patches or extensions that you need to download ever and if you run into a snack Squarespace has you covered 24 seven with award-winning customer service to answer your specific questions So what are you waiting for if you're ready to build a website? You can start a free trial today at Squarespace comm slash grainy days and if you use the code grainy days at checkout You can get 10% off your first purchase. Anyway, that's it. That's the end I hope you got something useful out of this video and if you didn't well Here's some footage of my dog being cute after a visit to the vet