Shooting at Gettysburg...

The line of the 16th Michigan Regiment
at Little Round Top. The monument to
the right is near the right flank. The small
marker on the left is the regiment's
 left flank.

The Gettysburg battlefield is an unusual place. Its very name is enough to draw visitors by the hundreds of thousands every year and we’ve been among them for the last three years. The history is a powerful draw for people from around the world, especially from around the United States. The experience, if you listen to the surroundings, brings you back over and over again.

Start at the Visitors Center and take the short walk to the Armisted marker. That’s the high point of Pickett’s charge. From there, look across the field at the Virginia Memorial and measure the difference between a costly success and a bloody failure.

And then walk Pickett’s Charge. Think about what happened that afternoon, July 3, 1863.

From here, see the Wheatfield to
the right, the face of Little Round
Top to the left and Plum Run Valley
between them.

Everyone seems to have an area of the battlefield they want to see more than once. Kids seem to like the scattered boulders known as the Devil’s Den area. Others among us are partial to Little Round Top or the Wheatfield. Pick a spot, read the markers and memorials and then look at the vistas in front of you. Try to understand what happened on the spot where you stand all those years ago.

You aren’t reading a book or watching a movie. You’re standing on a spot where history happened. If you know something about the battle, it is easier to understand what you are looking at. But there is an audio tour and plenty of markers to help you understand what you see.

We’ll spend a week at Gettysburg, starting tomorrow. Part of that time will be dedicated to attending the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College and the remainder will be spent on the battlefield itself, Nikon in hand. I want to augment the images I already have of the battlefield.

The monument to a Union sharp
shooter regiment. The monument
is located on the Loop near
the Wheatfield.

Two cameras this time, the D90 digital and the N8008 film camera. I want to shoot with black and white film, something I haven’t tried at Gettysburg before. You can convert color digital images to black and white (see www.speedylee.com for examples) but film gives a different feel to an image and it never hurts to push yourself as a photographer.

There are lots of websites devoted entirely to Gettysburg battlefield photography and you can find some tremendous images. But the battlefield allows for lots of different photographic approaches and we’ll see this week what images my ideas can produce.

Thanks for reading!