For those of you who are reenactment enthusiast, the weekend of November 6th thru the 8th, saw a rather unique program at the Railroad Museum in Parrish FL. A World War II reenactment of a German train depot battle scene, that provided quite a few photo opportunities. It was rather exciting, photographically speaking, you just don't get many opportunities with period costumes that are down to the smallest detail to make really great photos. Oh yeah, this can prove to be a real challenge to get photos that would look realistic without any modern day items, in the photos. But of course, you are shooting digital photos, you can photoshop them out right, well sort of, you need to look for shots that will convert to black & white to give what I call "realistic period appeal." One way of course is to be very careful of what is is the frame, I look for things that don't belong in the picture and I either frame them out or I completely recompose the photo at a different angle if something is in the frame. Some of the multitude of things to look for are, modern planes, trains, cars, people who are not in period costumes and the list goes on and on. You even have to look out for trash cans. (I took a great photo of a realistic shoot up scene only to discover that there was a plastic trash can sitting in the shot.) Yes, photoshopping the trash can out sounds like the thing to do, unfortunately it gets tricky replacing that space with something that balances light wise with the image, when you convert to black and white. You tend to get something either to dark or to light, plus you are spending all this time on a photo that may not look right when you finish. Being a WWII buff, I really enjoyed this shoot, I only wish I could have stayed longer, but I had another photo job to contend with Saturday afternoon. But overall, I was still thinking of the photos I got that morning and how eerie they seem to look once I converted them to black and white. Take a look and you will see what I mean, they almost look "to real" to me!!
2 comments:
Love the shots on your site, David. How did you find out about this? I would have gone crazy there. What a blast I bet that was!
Thanks for the feedback on this Carolyn... I found out about it reading the newspaper. There was a real small article, I almost past it up... but I realized this would be really interesting to see what was going on.. and absolutely it was a blast... all the actors were extremely friendly and knowledgeable... I will be looking for this type of reenactment again ... soon I hope....
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