Category: Photography
07MAY2024 – Photo of the Day
06MAY2024 – Photo of the Day
Camera Girl, Guns and Glory
So, today Camera Girl and I attended a gun show. Well, no. The guy there told me it wasn’t a gun show. And it was described as a Shooting, Outdoor, and Military Expo. And he was right there was other stuff for sure. They had World War II vintage trucks and jeeps and lots of veterans were there like the guys from the Geronimo Foundation who had details of the reenactments they do of D-Day and other paratrooper deployments.
There was a lot of interesting things besides guns. For instance, what the heck is this? I’m sure it made a lot of noise and blew up a lot of stuff but what is it called?
But there were a lot of guns, so to me it was a gun show.
There were all kinds of antique guns and there were a lot of rifles from the World Wars. But there were also countless modern weapons that ran the gamut from hunting rifles to self-defense to just enthusiast favorites. I think most of the machine guns were from World War II but being completely uninformed I couldn’t really say for sure.
But I got a whole load of shots mostly with my Voigtländer 10mm f/5.6 manual focus lens. In tight spaces such a wide-angle lens helps out. Of course, the manual focus aspect is not so helpful but it was still manageable.
I’ll be processing all the files and then I’ll add them to the Photo of the Day rotation to give everyone a break from my close-up documentation of my corner of Dunwich.
And I had some very interesting conversations with the denizens. One fellow was Vietnam era Army and he was telling about his time on the logistical side of that war. He said that if someone made a requisition for any kind of supply it had to be provided. One day someone came in and ordered three helicopters. And they had to provide them!
Well, it was a very interesting time and I enjoyed it. But I’m still as ignorant of gun knowledge as I was before I entered the hangar (it was at an airport). I asked Camera Girl if she wanted to try the helicopter ride that was available. She gave me a very squinky look and I let it go.
I’ve been meaning to get a gun for the house for a long time. I’ve only delayed this long because Camera Girl has Sicilian blood on her mother’s side and providing her with a firearm always seemed like stretching my luck. But now that we saw so many exciting choices, who knows. Some of the young guys at the show were playing around with guns that had the light or laser aiming assist. Suddenly I had the image of Arnold Schwarzenegger showing up at the compound and I thought maybe I’m better off building a panic room instead. Well, maybe I should do both. After all, in the upcoming cannibal interregnum you can’t have too many precautions.
05MAY2024 – Photo of the Day
Guest Contributor – TomD – 03MAY2024 – Guns
Gun shows aren’t the best place for gun photography. I say this knowing your environment is totally alien to mine but do you have gun clubs there, competitions? The competitors usually love talking about their weapons and showing them off.
Here’s one of my competition rifles, the others are bolt actions. I’ve used this one for F Class matches. Shot from the prone (laying down) position at 600 yards. The target is the size of a paint can lid and, to be in the running, you have to hit it every time, 60 times in a row. No matter what the wind is doing.
Most rifles like this are chambered in .223 or 5.56 Nato (essentially the same thing) but this one is 6.5mm Grendel. It has quite a bit more “punch” than a 5.56, especially at range.
Pistols too.
S&W version of the 1911
This one is for home defense.
I live in farm country with no visible neighbors but you can hear them shooting every Sat and Sun afternoon. With the nearest neighbor being a good piece of a mile away and 911 a good 15-20 minutes if you’re lucky, I do admit to a certain degree of comfort of having something like this handy but reality is that I don’t need it.
Everyone here is armed. A burglar would have to be suicidal to try breaking into homes around here and since, burglars don’t tend to suicidal, they don’t.
About 12 years ago, some druggie in Pensacola killed a couple of his “co-workers” and dumped the bodies a couple of miles from my house. The only crime here originates from family members of people known to the victim. And it is exceedingly rare.
The home invasion robbery, the kind that gives people nightmares, does not exist here.
The Benelli Nova shotgun below is modified to contain 7 rounds up to 3-1/2 magnums. I keep it loaded with 3” Buck. I hope I don’t have to shoot it, the recoil is brutal, even to someone not particularity recoil sensitive.
04MAY2024 – Photo of the Day
Emerging From the Cocoon
Just finished up a large and annoying project at work. So, I’m celebrating a day of freedom with a big mug of coffee that Camera Girl made for me. To paraphrase a line from a movie, “What did people do before they had coffee?” Someone once told me that the American Century was fueled on coffee and cigarettes. I could believe him. Could the decline in American effectiveness in so many arenas be attributed to the decline in smoking? It’s an interesting idea.
I’m looking out the window at the grass growing and the first butterflies of the year. Unfortunately, I’m also seeing the first carpenter bees of the season. For anyone lucky enough to not know what these are, they look like exceptionally large, aggressive bumble bees that burrow into wood (such as the outside of my house) and make a nest in which they lay their eggs. Camera Girl was picking some dandelions that were in one of her raised gardens when a couple of these destructive bugs started to buzz around her. I warned her away from the garden and promised to find out where they were burrowing and use lethal force to settle their hash.
May will be a very busy month both at home and work. And that’s fine. With the longer days and hopefully the warmer temperatures there will be more time to fix stuff and set things up around the grounds. Today I was reminded of another piece of carpentry that has intruded on Camera Girl’s sense of how things should be. And with the price of lumber and hardware reaching astronomical heights, what a wonderful time it is to be a homeowner.
The first hummingbird sightings have occurred and Camera Girl has put up her feeders. I’ll try this year to do a better job with the 200-600mm lens to get some really good shots of them. Yesterday I went out to get a few shots of the big elm tree that grows around here. The leaves were bursting out of their buds and the tree has a very distinctive appearance that I wanted to capture.
Another drama playing out this spring is the epic battle between Camera Girl’s pet crow Moe and his arch-enemy Poe (a newly arrived raven). She leaves scraps out for Moe in the morning but lately Poe shows up and snatches them. Just now Camera Girl called me over to the living room window to witness Moe dive bombing Poe and forcing him away from the snack area. Secretly I’m a fan of Poe. I’ve always wanted a raven in the neighborhood and this seems like my big chance. Maybe it’s my fate to become the man who made peace between Moe and Poe. I mean can’t they all just get along sharing the chicken fat? Nobel Peace Prize? We’ll see.
I think it’s time for a photo expedition. I’ll have to make a survey of what the local environment has to offer. There are usually some antique car rallies and such things but I was hoping for something a little different. What I think I’d like to get to is a gun show. I know very little about guns but I think they could make a very good photo opportunity. I’ve contacted one of the bigger shows to see if they have any qualms about photography.
Well anyway, we’ve finally put the last vestiges of winter behind us. I saw a spring peeper stumbling around after I raked up some leaves and he staggered away into the woods looking like Mitch McConnell blinking in the lights of the photojournalists trying to confirm that he is indeed still breathing.
This weekend we’re going to a lecture on the latest word on beekeeping. It’s been more than a decade since my last hive collapsed. I’ve watched a few videos on the “natural” beekeeping method. I stopped trying to keep them when the varroa mites devastated the whole industry back fifteen years or so. I’ve toyed with the idea of catching a wild swarm on the theory that these bees have come into equilibrium with the various pests and will fare much better than the heavily “medicated” hives that exist on the edge of succumbing to the very insecticides used to beat back the mites. I’ll ask this local expert what he thinks and who knows, maybe I’ll try my hand at beekeeping again. Although I’ve been warned that between blueberries, raspberries and bees I’ll have every black bear in a fifty-mile radius lined up to clean me out. Such is life.
Well in the immortal words of George Costanza, “You know, Spring! Rejuvenation, re-birth, everything’s blooming, all that crap!”
03MAY2024 – Photo of the Day
02MAY2024 – Photo of the Day
