Blog – girlpillz

bro I'm gonna shoot so many (cool pictures of) deer with this thing

So what the hell have you been up to lately Janet? And more importantly what the hell am I looking at?

Well besides having started a full-time gig back in February, and just kinda takin a break from drawing in general, making this thing! A rifle stock mounted 35mm camera with a pistol grip shutter release, built from scrap pieces of wood and a rifle stock blank left behind by my grandpa.

Oh, ok. But why?

Well, a few months back my folks were going through some of my grandfather's belongings, including a big collection of film cameras and equipment from way back when. Long story short I got really interested in it all, and started to use one of his old cameras myself. I was really enjoying the process of it all, and found using these older cameras to be really fun. I knew photography was a big hobby of his back in the day, hell he even made a lil darkroom closet in his house! So it was nice to get to enjoy taking pictures with the same cameras he used.

these guys are just so much fun take pics of lol

While I was starting to shoot film, we had gotten a new family of deer visiting our backyard, with little baby fawns to boot! I was having a blast taking pics of all of ‘em, but with the large lens I had on the camera it was gettin a little harder to keep a steady hand and focus. I thought, “huh y’know it’d be a lot easier if this thing was just mounted on a rifle, it’d make this way more natural to hold onto… Wait someone has had to have done that before right?”

Sure enough, a quick search later and I had found tons of examples of old cameras being mounted onto stocks, and lemme tell ya, I immediately knew I had to make one. Not only did it seem like the exact type of weird project I could get into, and luckily my grandpa had left behind the perfect base for this endeavor.

well, lets get started

While also being into photography, my grandpa was also quite a good gunsmith, and amongst the piles of stuff he left behind was a perfect roughly carved base for what I assume was probably a shotgun. And after quickly laying it up against my camera, I could see it, the camera carbine.

So I got to work, roughing out the shape I wanted. I cut a curve out of the butt of the stock, shortened the front a bit, and sawed the top flat, so I could mount the hardware in later. After that I mocked it up, and was even more confident in this stupid idea.

ain't she pretty?

After that, it was onto the grip, which would hold the trigger for the shutter release cable. Now I had bought a vintage grip for this purpose (two actually!) and had planned to paint it a nice color over the metal. But after testing it out I was not that convinced, so naturally I decided to do the harder thing and carve my own damn grip! I had been to a really cool art supply thrift store and got my hands on some scrap pieces of walnut, which I then glued all together and then cut into a rough shape of the grip.

ngl I think this might be the coolest pic of me to date

All in all I am VERY happy with how this turned out, I have basically no previous woodworking skills (unless you count a guitar I tried to build in college and promptly threw in dumpster when I finished it lol), AND I did this all with hand tools, minus a power drill cuz like c'mon who is gonna use a hand crank drill let's be real. But yeah I do have a couple things I'd like to add in the future, like a leather stock cover and sling, but I think I'll save those additions for a rainy day. I'm just happy that I got to make something that helped me a little with my grandpa's passing, cuz that's really what made me want to make this.

My grandpa was a lot of things, a firefighter, a carpenter, a gunsmith, an all-around craftsman. I swear he could make the most beautiful objects, but probably had the most messy shop space I’ve ever seen. He was a big quiet man, who showed his love through the things he did and the objects he made. He had even built the house that me and my folks all live in now, all the way back in 1976.

Back when I was a kid, he was always telling me stories on our long Sunday walks, while we watched his hunting dog chase down some rabbits in the fields. I was always in awe of how much he seemed to know, it seemed like he could remember so much about the things he cared about, but not so much in the present. Being the hunter-gunsmith he was, early on he taught me how to shoot. Starting with knocking soda cans down with a bb gun in the backyard, all the way to shooting down steel targets with old buffalo rifles from a good 500 meters away.

When I had moved onto the bigger rifles and into highschool, he had started taking me to competitions, and had even built me my own rifle to compete with. I remember him showing it to me one day and I was genuinely speechless. It was and still is one of the most beautiful things he ever made, he had even made it as light as it could be so I had less trouble shooting it while standing. I never really got to see the inside of his shop much as a kid, so when he made stuff like this it always seemed so magical. I could never wrap my head around how he did any of that stuff, he just kinda had that talent with those things. And even though marksmanship and guns is probably something I'll never get into again, I will always appreciate the time he took to share that side of him with me. I'll never forget our long drives out into the country, and our quiet nights camping out before a competition.

I’ve really been missing him a lot lately, there’s a lot I wish I could still learn from him, and I wish I had gotten to connect with him more after I had transitioned. But life happened. I ran away from home, lived in Ohio for a while, got in a not so great relationship, broke up a year later right when Covid hit. All the while his health slowly declined.

By the time I finally moved back to California, he died a week later.

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I’d like to think he’d enjoy this weird thing I made. I’m sure he would have gotten a kick out of it at least, and probably a few good pointers on woodworking for next time.

Thanks Papa.