Boomsticks: Gratuitous Gun Pr0n No. 31

On Memorial Day, I wanted to do an evocative photo that would stand alone as my post for the day. I went into the museum, grabbed my Garand, M1917, and Springfield and (pulling the bayonets off the latter two) dragged them and my camera outside. I set the rifles up in the field across the road, intending to get either a fairly abstract closeup of the old warhorses, or maybe a starker, longer shot, with the holiday boaters on the lake in the background under a clear blue sky and the rifles small in the foreground.

I stacked arms and spent the better part of twenty minutes filling a memory card full of images, in the process getting some nice shots of the 1943 Springfield Garand, the 1919 M1903 Mark I, and the Eddystone M1917, but when I got back inside, nothing really grabbed me. Oh, I had some swell shots for later "From The Vault..." posts, but nothing really said "Memorial Day."

Reluctantly, I started returning the rifles to their resting places in the museum, and then, as I clicked the bayonet on the Garand, the muse struck. I went jogging back across the road, rifle in hand, and took the picture seen in this post. Composition-wise, it's my favorite: holiday boaters on the lake in the background, infinite blue heavens above, and the stark, solitary inverted Garand overlooking the scene. Still, though, despite finally having "The Picture" I was looking for, I wondered what to do with some of the better outtakes from the first session. Why not go 'head and share some of those too? So here they are... :)