the embedded photographer

causus belli

It was probably duing my A-Level years that the English Civil War really became "my period", and I then went up to Cambridge with the firm idea of doing a PhD on the subject. But those three happy undergraduate years excited so many other passions (I don't just mean for language students) that the love for history no longer seemed so all-encompassing, and in Margaret Thatcher's depressing 1980s an academic life seemed pretty improbable. So I got on my bike and suffered a career in accounting before eventually digging my way back to daylight and financial IT in the late 1990s.

I had taken up photography in my late twenties and then in 2004 got the opportunity to write a book on digital black and white. That gave me new belief in my photography, but I sorely needed new subjects. Suddenly I hit upon combining photography with history - an idea that should have been so obvious that I can't work out why it had waited till then.

The original project was not limited to military re-enactment - I am not a pacifist but neither am I militaristic. My interest is in history and the project was to record how the past is kept alive by ordinary people who dedicate their spare time to running steam railways, driving vintage cars, or re-enacting history. Military re-enactment was to be just an aspect of this wider theme.

reconnaissance

But as is supposed to happen in war, the plan didn't survive the first big encounter with the subject - Military Odyssey, a large multi-period event that sprawled over the August 2004 holiday weekend.

Re-enactment seemed to fall in two very different scenes - groups into the twentieth century and others into earlier periods. The modern era groups seemed more like militaria collectors and seemed had contemporary overtones. I didn't know what to make of the SS-uniformed British owners of a Tiger main battle tank, while members of the 2nd Guards Rifle Division seemed more left-inclined and had taken advantage of the availability of original Red Army gear. I felt much more at ease with the Italophile leader of a two man group that collects Italian army kitchens and recipe books - he was cooking ciabatta and pizza in a field oven. To service this market were stalls selling collect medals, books, maps and other militaria.

The re-enactors were more interesting, perhaps because they seemed less materialistic and more into the history. Some were collectors too, one or two had personal connections with their periods, such as a Victorian infantry group whose ancestors had fought in South Africa. But most were just into their periods - everything from WWI to the American Civil War, through the Napoleonic era and back into the Dark Age and Romano Britons.

In the re-enactment scene, the Sealed Knot is by far the largest and best known group and that weekend they fielded 3000 soldiers including cannon and cavalry. The arena was poorly-laid out, but I found a great spot close to the action and shot so many pictures I filled all my memory cards and had to switch to jpegs rather than raw format. Since that first encounter with the Sealed Knot, I've photographed dozens of English Civil War musters.

the campaigning season

Each year there are a few dozen English Civil War re-enactments which take place all around the country, often in beautiful locations with connections to historical events. Some are on the original sites of the battle they depict.

Events vary in size. At small ones there might be just 50-100 participants, maybe one or two cannon, and a living history camp. These are less crowded and more informal, so you can smell the gunpowder and get nice and close with your camera. Larger "major" events such as Wetherby might have 2-3 thousand participants, cannon, and cavalry, and can be very impressive.

showing one's colours

A very satisfying aspect of the project has been sharing the pictures with participants. Immediately after the first event I attended, I had set up an online gallery which I announced in the Sealed Knot's online forum. I happily emailed full-res files to anyone who recognized themselves because I was keen to show my appreciation of their efforts – and you don't carry cameras when you're in the 17th century. The resulting feedback was so encouraging that I now create a gallery after every battle and leave it online for a few weeks. It was a great way to introduce myself at other re-enactments and soon led to opportunities to photograph private events.

collateral damage

Sharing pictures online has a handy side effect - unlike wildlife or landscape photographers, my pictures' subjects help out with the captioning. The Newcastles, who invited me to Wetherby, first contacted me to correct some misidentification in a web gallery.

While I am glad when people see themselves in my pictures, I'm very clear about not wanting to take photographs for that reason. A war photographer doesn't shoot "team photos" and the pictures would soon become very different, more records of events. This picture, for example, might show the Newcastles' faces but it's all about how pike regiments defend against cavalry.

ambush

I always arrive nice and early. For one thing I like to see the battlefield and find out roughly what's planned. I'll usually look for spots where I can shoot into the light while also avoiding backgrounds the crowd or other modern junk. Planning rarely hurts.

But there are other reasons. It's always worth raiding the Living History camp where you find all sorts of contemporary scenes - Puritan preaching, candle making and other crafts, soldiers relaxing.

There are also opportunities for pictures when just before the armies march onto the battlefield. They usually get held up at a gate or have to hang around somewhere, and at these moments you can get nice and close - there's often an interesting tension in the air.

And, if there's a beer tent, I do like to make sure I've time for a pint.

tactics

During the roughly hour-long battles, I'll move with the action to 2-3 viewpoints – fortunately I'm tall enough to shoot over spectators" heads if needed.

Battlefield-wide scenes are almost-inevitably chaotic that. While they may impress, they don't usually make good photographs, so I'm looking for details or individuals within the chaos.

I mostly zoom in with a 70-200mm f2.8 lens, often with a 1.4x teleconverter and with the camera usually on a monopod. There's a danger of only seeing the action through the viewfinder and missing what may be developing elsewhere. So I continually look up and scan the scene - it's a similar experience to sports photography.

munitions

Apart from liking the period of history, re-enactment of 16th to 19th century warfare also means lots of gunsmoke. Musket or cannon fire looks best when you're shooting into the light and the sun is coming through the smoke, but the contrast range can be very high and on sunny days you get bright reflections off any shiny breastplates or helmets.

To capture detail in the brightest areas, I tend to underexpose. Even if the pictures then look too dark on the camera's LCD screen, I can then lift the shadow tones later on computer, knowing I've captured detail the brightest parts of the picture.

logistics

This need for tonal range and is why I only shoot in raw format. You also need a lot of pictures to be sure of capturing fast-moving action and gunfire.

That imposes quite a logistical burden, because in a couple of hours you can easily shoot a few hundred 15Mb frames. There's no time to review and delete duds in the field, so I now carry enough memory cards for 1000 shots and can also download pictures onto the Epson portable hard drive that I keep in my bag.

Powering all these electronics was a problem for the Wetherby weekend. As I was camping, I bought an adapter for the car's cigarette lighter to supply power to my three chargers. I also bought an extra 4Gb memory card which held 250 raw files and feel that it was an easier solution. Spare camera batteries would be a good idea too. It all means more weight – luckily Beardsworths are built for manual work!

weapons

When you photograph muskets or cannon firing, there's a fraction of a second between seeing the first sparks from the fuse, and flames shooting from the barrel. You have to be dead lucky to capture both in the same frame - and a moment later the entire scene will be lost in a mass of white smoke.

So you need to listen for the order to fire, or see the match being put to the breech, and then keep shooting pictures. My previous Nikon D100 needed to write the pictures to its flash card after only 4 shots, so I often missed the crucial moment, but Wetherby was my D200's first re-enactment. It lets me blaze away at 5 frames a second for up to 21 frames - perfect for the heat of battle.

black and white

Another early decision was to make the pictures black and white. partly personal preference anyway, this was also a nod towards the great tradition of war photography which I'd grown up admiring - Capa, Baltermants, and McCullin and WW2, Vietnam, N Ireland and other conflicts. I wanted to apply th reportage style to the 17th century and b&w seemed ideal.

Also I had always imagined the English Civil War through black and white images in my school and university textbooks. They were illustrated with contemporary lithographs and woodcut prints and greyscale reproductions of Van Dyck's paintings, and I only saw colours much later in London's National Gallery. Even then I think I subconsciously dismissed these paintings because they featured the rich and powerful, not the ordinary reality of the war. One Sealed Knot commander, who in the 21st century is a graphic designer, immediately spotted what I was aiming for when he said that for the 1640s black and white is simply "authentic”.

Just as black and white suits the English Civil War, I use sepia and purplish tones for my work on American Civil War re-enactors, while the Napoleonic era seems right in colour.

I always convert the pictures to black and white with Photoshop's black and white adjustment layer, often using more than one and adding masks to help differentiate uniform colours or adjust face tones. I've tried Silver Efex Pro but I don't feel any need to simulating a particular film stock and I think it's just overpriced.

The final prints use special paper and inks - Permajet paper and their pure MonochromePro inks and, without being mercenary, I've sold a number of prints to re-enactors who saw themselves in my web gallery.

 

the reluctant knotter

This project started in 2004 but it was only when it was still going strong in 2007 that I decided to join the Sealed Knot.

I have no inclination to be a re-enactor, and have only been in kit twice. Once was for the studio shot for the magazine cover, and the other time was at Wetherby when the Newcastles dressed me up and armed me with an 18 foot pike. I'm not at all ashamed to say I made a poor soldier - I don't like being shouted at, and pike blocks crushing into each other was too much like rugby union. And all the time I was on the battlefield I was seeing great action shots and wanting a camera in my hands.

Another reason for a reluctance to join up was that Knotters generally camp near the events and there's a big element of socialising around a beer tent (the Sealed Knot is nicknamed "the armed wing of Camra"). Much though I like my real ale, I like to be independent and camping holds little appeal.

But the key reason for my eventually joining up was photography and wanting to get closer to the action. As Capa said "if it's not good enough you're not close enough"....

Some people join particular regiments because they were recruited by friends, others were literally born into theirs (the Knot's been around for 40 years), and others simply feel drawn to the Cavalier or Roundhead cause. I'm one of that last group whose conscience determines their flag. So is that King or Parliament? Well, that's probably where I experienced the danger of being embedded with the military in Iraq or Afghanistan, and I worked hard to ensure the Newcastles, a fiercely Royalist regiment, never uncovered my true Parliamentarian sympathies. You know, I'm rather lucky I didn't meet a premature end with my head on a Royalist spike….