American civil war re-enactment #photography

My first picture today sets the scene, you can see the soldiers and their tents, but you want to see more. This was an American civil war re-enactment that I photographed on Sunday. It was hard to get close to the action, but I tried to zoom in as much as I could, despite the explosions!

Loud bangs make you jump a little too, so keeping the camera still was a slight problem. One explosion sent turf raining down on me!

Close up shots like this are good, but I really wanted action shots once the battle had started. So I needed a fast shutter speed.

This is a good shot, I not only got the moment the cannon fired, I did it twice. Notice the out of focus leaf on the right side of the picture. I was shooting from under a tree, so had some shade. Without direct light going into the camera, the camera compensated for that and gave me lighter pictures. It was a cloudy day, but the sun came out at times. I had the ISO set on 400, so when I did shots on manual and the sun came out, the shots were a little bright!

 

I was quite close to these guys and so could do close ups with the 105mm lens. You can get even closer to the action with a modern bridge camera, but won’t get the definition and quality of a DSLR.

The sun came out for this shot and I adjusted the brightness in editing to get that smoke just right.

The smoke added realism to the pictures, but did get quite thick at times. I used the sports setting on my camera most of the time, for fast shutter speeds to capture the action.

 

Images can also be converted to sepia, but it’s a shame about the modern houses in the background. You can blur those in editing if you want or lighten them so they don’t stand out so much.

That’s all for this week. I’ll be doing another photography post tomorrow on A Zillion Ideas, with more pictures from the weekend. Please share your views in the comments box and you can also follow me on Twitter for updates.

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