Friday, June 02, 2006

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... :)

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Excellent!

I haven't seen rifles stacked since boot camp...

Thank you!!!

BobG said...

A sunny field, some vintage rifles, life doesn't get much better than that...

Anonymous said...

It’s a good thing I didn’t see this before yesterday...

phlegmfatale said...

I love the poetic quality of all these, as well as your Memorial Day post. Well done!

Anonymous said...

Yes, I remember.

That image is beautiful, because it shows what the gun is for. We stand with arms so that people can persue their lives, and their happiness, and may be not afraid - because they are free to send to Hell any bastard who dares defray their happiness in the name of their own. And that's about it.

To be honest, Tam old love, I don't even realise why such a right is a cause of debate anywhere.

Anonymous said...

That's why if you have a Garand, you have to have at least three, so you can stack them.

I was with a group at the Garand Match at Camp Perry in 2000. We neatly stacked our rifles behind the line while we waited for the match to start. We couldn't understand why we were the only ones to do it, cause it looked so cool. We had 15 rifles stacked in five piles.

Gewehr98 said...

Wonder where she got the idea to stack arms from?

http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=2971