Trawling through old albums and things the other day I came across a whole pile of photographs or myself (seems like another life now) and also came across a few 8mm and 16mm films – yes films – not videos!
Of course the problem with these as with all gadgets these days is that technology moves on incredibly fast. That wonderful “state of the art” stuff you had way back when is simply long gone and old hat – antique man! The first question of course was how to run the films? I mean I can’t even run my old video cassettes because we’re on to CD’s – oops! maybe I mean DVD’s – or oops again – maybe that’s old hat – I can’t keep up with it nowadays.
Anyway fortunately I had a friend who not only knows these things but is a collector believe it or not of “technological advanced gadgets”. This means he collects all this stuff and better still, keeps them in working condition. When I mentioned film to him – his eyes lit up. He immediately said what format mate? It transpires there over 150 film formats from chronophotographe to biograph to 13mm or 18mm and so on….
When I said 8mm and 16mm his face actually fell – “Oh that stuff – that’s easy. I’ve got a couple of projectors lying around somewhere”.
So to cut a long story short – I managed to run the films and took some still grabs off them and stuck them on my computer. Then I decided to do a little bit of drawing, painting and generally turning some of them into pictures. And this is the first one -
The "Weaver" stance
Taken from an original training film I was involved in many years ago now, this shows what was known then as the classic “Weaver” handgun aiming stance. Named after a guy who first used it and still a very solid and dependable method today. I’ll mention more on that later.
But the image was first captured, then transferred to my pc and then I started the screen process of drawing it to canvas as a charcoal sketch image. This was further altered and cropped a little and with colour brush strokes I “painted” the image as I wanted. I also cropped the original image down to the essentials. Layering out the background I wanted to concentrate on the subjects concentration - so pulled the viewer in by leaving out extraneous data.
You might also notice if you look carefully – the shooter is left eyed – it is his left eye that is being used not the right and this business about in and out I highlighted above, is also so applicable to this shooting stance.
The strong hand (right) grips the weapon and is pushed out straight. The weak hand grips the fingers/fist of the right and pulls it and elbow in tight to the body. So in and out. This effectively “locks” the arms into a semi-tripod affair against the body. It makes for a very stable shooting platform, where the recoil is taken up with body stance and the heavy upper shoulder muscles. For fast accurate “double tapping” there’s not much better than this. ( here endeth the lesson!!).
Anyway as I said another time, another life and a long time ago – but the Art is fresh and up to date and it was fun doing it.
