Red Ruger 10/22 Target Lite

I recently had the pleasure of testing and photographing a red Ruger 10/22 Target Lite. Rimfires are always fun, but this one’s bright color had me worried about images.

They turned out great and my grandson is begging me to buy it rather than ship it back to Ruger. He probably sent 200 rounds through the gun without a single hiccup. That’s saying a lot considering he’s only 10 and never stuffed a 10-round, rotary magazine before.

That’s no stoppages, malfunctions or bruised knuckles the entire day. He was so comfortable with the thumbhole stock that we didn’t adjust length of pull, either, which is impressive with his spindly stature.

Amazing Accuracy

I wrote a review for Shooting Illustrated. The accuracy was amazing for a production firearm and—in reality—a little frustrating. Every five-shot group had one round wander significantly. They were random, too. The barrel never got warm, much less hot. I stuck to sub-sonic loads.

User malfunction is the only explanation. If you haven’t tried this new Ruger drop in trigger, you’re missing a real treat.

Red Ruger 10/22 Target Lite Photo Challenge

Red looks great in person and caught the eye of my grandson immediately. I surmise it does the same with customers in sporting goods stores.

My concerns stemmed from the fact that the color has an annoying habit of oversaturating and “vibrating” in photos. If you look at some of the images and video I posted on YouTube, it turns out I didn’t have a thing to worry about. The gun and all its details look great, although I think that gray/black layer did the heavy lifting.

Focus Stacked

A red Ruger 10/22 Target Lite is too good looking to leave things fuzzy and slightly out of focus. So, I focus stacked.

The technique is labor intensive and torturous. You find your exposure, manually focus on the closest point you want tack sharp, then hit the shutter.

Minutely change focus on the next furthest point and take another picture. You can do this by turning the lens or using a fancy contraption akin to a miniature model of a Medieval rack to stretch naughty servants.

Repeat (the shutter that  is, not more torture for the help) until you’ve run out of gun/parts you want in focus. Don’t touch the tripod or breathe heavily during the process. You might have to start over.

The above photo is somewhere around 50 separate ones combined using software. I quit keeping inventory when I ran out of fingers and toes.

I touched on the technique before, and there’s a lot of authoritative writing on the web about photo stacking. If you’re interested do a Google search. Adobe Photoshop gets it done nicely, but there are other programs available as well.

With the Mission First Compensator I used a 100 mm Macro Canon lens. For the red Ruger 10/22 Target Lite I went with my battle-worn 50 mm macro, just because I didn’t want to leave the county to finish the photos.

For those Ruger fans, and there’s a ton of them, here are 3 things you probably didn’t know about Ruger.

This photo approach is very similar to what I used for the FN 15 Combat Tactical FDE P-LOK review.

I think they turned out great, but take a look at my slide show/videos on YouTube and let me know what you think.