If you’re reading this on the actual site (as opposed to a feed reader) you may have noticed that the banner image at the top of the page has changed. I spent a couple of hours today creating that image, so I’m going to talk a bit about it.

My first attempt was pretty basic: my MacBook and my Marlin 39a, an iconic lever action rifle that’s over a hundred years old in design. To fill some space, I sprinkled some 22LR ammo. As a background, I used a coffee table/trunk I built myself.

Although I was pretty happy with the Marlin, I decided to try the M1 Garand, another iconic rifle. The Garand was the standard military issue rifle through most of WW2 and the Korean War, and should look familiar to any war movie buff. Ultimately, I decided it conjured the wrong impression. I made a few other changes in the 2nd version, which I did end up keeping. One was a different orientation for the rifle, and the second was to display my blog on the laptop (yay recursion!), and the third was to use larger .308 Winchester rounds to fill the space.

I switched back to the Marlin, and things looked pretty good. But something didn’t feel quite right. I went out to run errands, and realized that the wood panel background was a little boring. Since I had a target from a match today that I was planning on photographing for a post on my gun blog, I decided to stick that in the background. The target also added a sense of seriousness, and sportiness. I liked it. Cropping the image to fit the dimensions required by the blog’s template was somewhat challenging, but because I composed the image with cropping in mind, it turned out ok. Here’s the final product (click to see super-high-res version):