Pixiq

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War.  Even though battle reenactments take place every year, the events planned for the next four years will be especially large with hundreds and sometimes thousands of soldiers.  These engagements give us the opportunity to see what it was like to witness warfare in the 1860's, and at the same time we can make powerful pictures of battle scenes as well as portraits of the participants.  Many of these men and women look like they stepped right out of the pages of history.

During the Civil War, photographers like Matthew Brady couldn't capture action shots of the battles because the silver halide solution on the glass plates was extremely slow by the standards of today, thus the exposures were quite long.  Brady photographed the aftermath of the battles.  With our digital cameras, we can capture the action with brief exposure times, of course, and this gives us tremendous creative control.

I prefer to turn all of the color photos into black and white or sepia.  This makes the images look historic rather than modern.  I use Silver Efex Pro 2 by Nik Software to do this, and my favorite preset in this program is antique plate II because it creates a yellow/brown vignette of the images that suggests fading over the course of a century and a half. The image below is an example.  [If you want to purchase this software or any of Nik's filters, use the promo code JZUCKERMAN and you'll save 15%]

The photo of the Battle of Resaca, Georgia, below, was taken at two o'clock in the afternoon under a clear sky.  This is the worst time for any kind of outdoor photography because the contrast is terrible.  The Nik filter helped mitigate the problem, but I also used the fill light slider in Adobe Camera Raw (and it's also available in Lightroom) to open up the shadows.  It was the only thing I could do, and in the end I was very pleased with the results.

Most of the battles take place relatively far away, so if you want to photograph them bring your longest lens.  Medium telephotos and even wide angle lenses are fine for the portraits, but for the battle scenes you'll appreciate having a long lens.  The battle scene you see here was taken with my 500mm f/4 Canon lens.  It is uncropped.

You should also look for details when walking through the Union or Confederate encampments.  There is a lot of rich photographic material.  In the picture below, I asked the Confederate soldier to take his pistol particially out of the holster and used a 24-105mm to take the shot.

If you want to embellish the images with a grunge look, they will look particularly old as if they were recently discovered in a dusty attic.  For the reenactment of the 1864 Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, below, in which 10,000 men participated (I shot this in 2004 which was the 140th anniversary of the battle), I used a grunge texture that I bought online from Flypapers Textures.