Critique Welcomed Little Bighorn Battlefield

[Brian Moore]

An 1894 photo by Henry Robinson Locke, photographer of Deadwood, South Dakota. No wait,...maybe its an 1856 Crimea image by Roger Fenton...?

Just kidding. It was taken by me a couple of months ago, somewhere along Battlefield Tour Road, at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Smoke from the wildfires in Alberta rendered the big Montana sky a nondescript gray, which looks to my eye like so many 19th century photos that have featureless skies.

Canon 5DSR with Canon 24-105L.

 

[Pete Askew]

It has just the right level of bleakness about it for an historic battlefield, helped by the featureless sky. At least you didn't bring any corpses with your to dress the set up.

 

[Brian Moore]

At least you didn't bring any corpses with your to dress the set up.

Unfortunately I had no corpses on me the day I was there, Pete. By the way, I understand that when Fenton was plying his trade in Crimea, battlefield images didn't show the dead (though they did show plenty of canon balls). Just a few years later, though, in the American Civil War, images by Matthew Brady's photographers, and presumably others, showed corpses aplenty, in all their gory resplendence. Such images shocked a public hitherto accustomed to thinking war a noble endeavor.

 

[Pete Askew]

Interesting, and it seems that the photographers of the civil war were not averse to moving the bodies around to 'improve' their shot either.

 

[Brian Moore]

Interesting, and it seems that the photographers of the civil war were not averse to moving the bodies around to 'improve' their shot either.

As Fenton may have done with the cannonballs in his Valley of the Shadow of Death photo.