Protected By Remington
Protected By Remington 42mm, f/5.6, 1/125s, ISO 400
There’s yet another reason to think twice about breaking into our home. We recently gave our daughter a Remington 870 20 gauge shotgun for her birthday. She had asked for one and how can a dad resist giving his girl a present like that? We don’t get to shoot nearly as often as we’d like but we enjoy shooting together whenever we can. You know it’s been a good day when you end up with this.
Simple photograph here: She wanted pics with the shotgun so we were just playing around to figure out what shots might be cool and ended up with this one. I used on-camera flash bounced up and behind the camera and focused on the end of the barrel using a large enough aperture to blur the background and the shooter (her request – “I don’t have makeup on, Dad”). I had to use at least a 1/125s shutter speed because she got tired trying to hold the gun still after a couple of frames. Fiddled with contrast, did some spot corrections, local exposure adjustments, etc. I would have loved a different background but there really weren’t many options in the house (we wanted an indoor shot — that whole “protection” angle).
Lest anyone freak out about gun safety I’ll point out that the gun is not pointed *at* me. Secondly, we are strict about personally checking our guns to make sure they are empty. We don’t rely on “the other guy”. I personally inspected the gun before handing it to her and getting anywhere near the end of that barrel. Finally, although it’s difficult to see in this pic, her finger is outside the trigger guard.
No Actual Birds Were Harmed In The Making Of These Memories…
Shells
Went shooting with my girls this weekend at a friend’s house in Fredericksburg (see this pic for the awesome sunrise view we had on Father’s Day). Later that evening I remarked, “Wow, we shot a lot of clays today”. I quickly corrected myself, however, amending my statement to “Well, we THREW a lot of clays today”. We have fun regardless of how well we shoot on a given day. Lots of memories come out of these events.
I managed to shoot about 40 rounds out of the 12 gauge before I got tired of the kick then I switched to the 20 gauge (we had three 20s out there) and went through another 50-ish. The girls and friends went through their share as well and we ended up with quite a pile of spent shells, part of which you see in the pic above. We also shot plenty of rounds out of a 9mm Glock, a .22 Ruger pistol, and a couple .22 rifles.
The pic above was created by tonemapping three exposures, the darkest of which just helped bring down the metal reflections a bit. I blended in a bit here and there from the original exposures and parts from a layer processed with the “photo pop” preset in Topaz Adjust. Added a curves adjustment, a slight levels adjustment (brought in more blacks), and a bit of sharpening to all that and voila…there it is.
