Civil War Days
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I went to the annual running of the Civil War Days held in Naperville, Illinois this weekend. This was a first time event for me and I had a lot of fun. Imagine a Trekkie convention but swap out your favorite klingon with Robert E. Lee or Ulysses S. Grant. The cool part is that all ages can get into act.
The day was sunny with lots of passing puffy clouds. The re-enactment would begin at 2:30pm. I was thinking I wanted to be able to go both long and wide and but didn’t want to lug around the whole arsenal. I decided on the Nikon D300 with grip, Nikon 70-200VR, Tamron 17-50 and the Nikon 1.7 tele-converter. That’s an effective range of 24 – 510mm (35mm equivalent). I decided to carry my 70-200 in its’ Nikon carrying case with a better strap from an old camera bag. I attached the tele-converter to the strap using its’ pouch and had my 17-50 mounted to the camera.
Before taking on a shoot, I like to set my intentions upfront to help keep me focused. First have fun!!! We all want to create a master piece but that is more apt to happen if you are having fun with your creative juices flowing. 2) Focus on the characters and their dress. 3) Basically check out how things are run with the thinking I would be back next year.
I arrived on location at about 1:00pm and the light was quite harsh. I was thinking I would need to find shade and diffused light whenever possible. People tend to hang out in the shade so that gets them out of the direct sun but introduces other issues like dappled light, deep shade and full sun reflections and blown out backgrounds. I was thinking that I really should have brought my flash unit at this point. Thankfully the D300 has a popup flash which I find does a decent job of providing fill.
My first shot was a couple of gals hanging out on the shady side of a covered wagon. The overall light wasn’t too bad and the background wasn’t either too dark or too light. I wanted to make sure I kept as much modern day elements out of my background. Things like cars and chain linked fences and those wearing their Justin Beeber T-shirts for example.
My next shot I would use the full sun to help accentuate the edges of a canon. I went in really close at 17mm to get a bigger than life feel to this image.
Now into the thick of things I began scoping out characters and attire. It was crowded the light was all over the place and the backgrounds were blown out or cluttered with modern day spectators. I needed to get tight to reduce as many of the distracting elements as possible. I changed to my 70-200 f/2.8 to help compress the background. I could also use a shallow depth of field to isolate my subject as I did on this image.
She was sitting underneath some large trees that diffuse the direct sun yet provided enough light where fill flash was not necessary. The shallow depth of field (dof) makes for a pleasant non-distracting background.
Using fill flash
This is an image of Ulysses S. Grant and he is in deep shade with a background that has number of hot spots. I positioned my self so the background was primarily a pine tree that had a similar exposure value to that my subject.
I took a reading using aperture priority mode and then switch to manual and dialed in the same shutter speed and F-Stop. I then hit the pop-up flash to provide me a little fill. The first image was too hot. I used flash compensation to go reduce the power by a half stop and still a little too hot. I cut down the power by another half stop (a total of 1 stop) which got me to what I was looking for. Just a kiss of light on the face under his hat, nice specular high lights in the eyes and a nicely exposed image.
The re-enactment would be more like a sports shoot, so position is key. I spoke with a couple of photogs to get an idea where to get settled. Think of it as a football game where you want to get seats at the 50 yard line. The light was change as clouds passed by. It could be really bright one minute and shady the next. I planned to shoot at F/2.8 for individuals and f/4 to f/5.6 for group shots. I wanted to keep the shutter speed up so I bumped the ISO to 400. I wasn’t worried about noise because there is ample light to keep the noise to a minimum. Having action, a long lens and reacting to what might be happening next, a fast shutter speed can really help reduce camera shake and motion blur.
This guy looks like he was plucked out of an old western . . .
Overall I really enjoyed this shoot. The participants are really passionate about the history, the regalia and getting into character to put on a memorable show. I was happy with the overall outcome. What would I do to improve? I would bring my dedicated flash. I would show up on the fist day of the event as I heard there were more participants on day one. I would take more images of the artifacts of that time period such as muskets, pistols, lanterns, spinning wheels and things of that nature. I would also try to get a better position for the re-enactment where I would have less competition when space shrinks as the activities begin to peak. Would I do it again? Most definitely!
Post processing was done in Lightroom. I decided maintain a antique/sepia look to compliment the time period. As always I shoot in raw.
See the entire series here