English Civil War
causus belli
Well before I studied history at Cambridge, the English Civil War was "my period". But a career in academic history seemed improbable in Margaret Thatcher's depressing 1980s, so I gave up my idea of doing a PhD on the subject and "got on my bike" for a less-than-inspiring career in accounting, before eventually making my escape into financial IT in the late 90s.
In my late twenties I took up photography, and finally in 2004 got the opportunity to write a book on digital black and white. With new fire and belief breathed into my photography, I was searching for new subjects for my camera and it seemed so obvious – combine my photography with my passion for history.
The original idea was to record how the past is kept alive by enthusiasts. I excluded the heritage industry and wanted to record how ordinary people dedicate their spare time to running steam railways, driving vintage cars, or re-enacting history. Historical re-enactment was going to be just one aspect of this wider theme.
As is supposed to happen in war, the battle plan didn't survive the first encounter with the subject. This happened at Military Odyssey, a large multi period event that sprawled over the August 2004 bank holiday weekend. That was when I first saw the Sealed Knot.
reconnaissance
At Military Odyssey you could quickly see there were two very different groups - collectors of militaria and historical re-enactors - and within each group one could identify further shades. Among the collectors I didn't know what to make of the SS uniformed British owners of a Tiger tank (I hear it is a 3/4 size replica) but felt much more at ease with a fellow Italophile who collects Italian army kitchens and recipe books and who was cooking ciabatta and pizza in his field oven. Other collectors seemed more opportunistic, like the 2nd Guards Rifle Division who were taking advantage the availability of former Red Army equipment. To service this market were stalls selling collect medals, books, maps and other militaria.
The re-enactors were more interesting for me, perhaps because they seemed less materialistic. 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 Vietnam to WW2, through the Napoleonic era and back as far as Romano Britons.
first skirmish
The Sealed Knot is by far the largest and best known British re-enactment group and that weekend they fielded 3000 soldiers including cannon and cavalry. The arena was poorly-laid out and the spectators were crammed into one area, but I found a great spot close to the action and shot so many pictures I filled all my memory cards and had to shoot a lot of jpegs rather than raw format images (as a result, I soon bought an Epson P2000 portable hard drive and can download pictures to it). Since then I've photographed about twenty English Civil War musters.
a godly people
Right from the start I wanted to illustrate the wider history of the period, not just depict the fighting, so it is important to include religion's role. The picture on the left was taken at the Sealed Knot's annual church service, while the others were from the living history camps or around the edge of the battlefield.
While the established church (second right) tried to bolster the King's authority, Puritan fundamentalists gave the New Model Army some of the disciplined characteristics of a revolutionary army, driven forward by a self-sustaining ideology. The austere preacher (second left) would have made a terrifying NKVD man in the Red Army or a fine Taliban mullah, don't you think?
showing one's colours
A very satisfying aspect of the project has been sharing the pictures with partcipants over the web. After Military Odyssey 2004, the first such event I attended, I set up an online gallery and posted its address in the Sealed Knot members forum. I happily emailed full-res files to anyone who recognized themselves. It showed my appreciation of their efforts – after all, you don't carry cameras when you're in the 17th century.
The resulting feedback was very encouraging, so now I create a gallery after every battle and leave it online for a few weeks. I provided a nice way to introduce myself at other re-enactments and soon led to great opportunities to photograph private events.
collateral impact
Sharing pictures online has a handy side effect - unlike wildlife or landscape photographers, my pictures' subjects often help out with the captioning. In fact, Newcastles first contacted me when I misidentified them in a web gallery. Now they know my face so I'm a coward and label as Newcastles any pictures where there's a white coat. Better safe than sorry.
the face of battle
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.
the campaigning season
Each year there are a few dozen English Civil War re-enactments and they take place all around the country, often in beautiful locations with specific connections to historical events. They vary in size. At small musters there might be 50-100 participants, usually foot soldiers, a cannon or two, 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. Other events are much larger and Wetherby was a fairly typical "major" with a couple of thousand participants, plenty of cannons, and cavalry too.
ambush
I always arrive early. Partly it's because you can get good close-ups of troops preparing to march onto the battlefield, but I also want my images to evoke a richer sense of the period and always raid the Living History camp. You find all sorts of contemporary scenes - Puritan preaching, candlemaking and other crafts, soldiers and the odd wench.
I shoot some candid shots but also ask subjects if they'd let me shoot a few snaps. This direct approach works well. It helps to share the interest in the Civil War and I sometimes show a few recent prints. It's also worth saying that digital also builds trust and makes portrait photography more interactive - people often let you shoot more portraits until one seems right.
munitions
Especially when you're photographing musket or cannon fire, the range of contrast can be very high, and on sunny days you can get bright reflections off armour and shiny helmets. So it can sometimes be hard to capture detail in the brightest areas. Since those areas are critical, I often underexpose my shots. Even if the pictures then look too dark on the camera's LCD screen, I can lift the shadow tones later on computer, knowing I've captured detail the brighest parts of the picture.
This need for tonal range is why I only shoot in raw format, only switching to jpeg when I'm running out of disc space. That imposes a logistical burden, because you need to shoot a lot of pictures to capture fast-moving action and gunfire and raw files are much bigger (15Mb each).
With little time to review and delete dud pictures in the field, I now carry enough memory cards for 800 shots and can download pictures onto an Epson P2000 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 (or was it four). 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.
I use a monopod, so I often have a series of almost identical frames. If one frame captures the sparks from the fuse, and the next one contains the explosion, you can sometimes blend the two in Photoshop. I shift drag one image onto another, 
then use the Difference blending mode to help me align them. A bit of painting on the layer's mask and I'm done. Is that subterfuge or good planning?
a nation divided
This picture (a single frame) isn't of the Sealed Knot or indeed of the English Civil War. The gun belongs to the Holcroft Bloods who joined the English Civil War Society to re-enact the Dutch attack on the Medway in 1667.
black and white
Another early decision was to make the pictures black and white. This was a deliberate nod towards the great tradition of war photography which I'd grown up admiring - photojournalists like Capa, Baltermants, and McCullin and WW2, Vietnam, N Ireland and other conflicts.I wanted to apply that sort of aesthetic to the 17th century.
Furthermore, I had always visualized the English Civil War in black and white. My school and college textbooks were illustrated with contemporary lithographs and woodcut prints, and even paintings were reproduced in greyscale. Colour came much later when I saw Van Dyck's paintings, which they portayed the rich, not the ordinary reality I wanted to depict.
Just as black and white suits the period, I use sepia and purplish tones for my work on American Civil War re-enactors while the Napoleonic era looks right in colour. 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”.
printing
The final prints use special paper and inks (Permajet's Parchment Classic aper 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.
I don't do a lot of Photoshopping. I'll remove anachronisms like 20th century telephone poles behind these Scots. I'll also dodge and burn just like in the darkroom, but I don't believe in adding or removing anything (other than Royal heads, and then only in desperation).
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.
taking aim
I look for details, not battlefield-wide scenes or "team photos", so I mostly zoom in with a 70-200mm f2.8 lens, often with a 1.4x teleconverter and usually on a monopod. There is a risk of missing things though, so like a sport photographers you need to make an effort not to limit yourself to whatever you seen in the viewfinder. I continually look up and scan around for any action that may be developing to one side.
mopping up
Cataloguing, reviewing and making the web gallery are done in iView before I process the best pictures in Photoshop. Not believing in plug-ins or actions that pretend to simulate a particular film stock, I always convert the pictures to black and white with Channel Mixer adjustment layers, often using more than one and adding masks to help differentiate uniform colours or adjust face tones. I never add elements, but I always used to dodge and burn extensively and for this project have no qualms about wiping out the odd spectator or other anachronism.
Some pike regiments attack "at point" and regard it as more historically accurate than the rugby scrum style "push" that is popular with others.
joining up
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.
At Wetherby I'd laid down my camera one day, donned the Newcastles' white jacket and carried an 18 foot pike out onto the battlefield. I'm not ashamed to say I made a very poor soldier - I don't like being shouted at, and pike blocks crushing into each other was too much like rugby union for me. As a photographer, I'd happily spend hours waiting for the perfect light, so I couldn't question the pike block's sanity, but all the time I was seeing great shots for my camera. In short - even after 20 musters, and despite a passion for the period, I haven't caught the bug to become a re-enactor. I was loaned the gear I'm wearing in the photographs of me.
Nor does camping appeal - over the Wetherby weekend I didn't sleep for 2 nights - though I am a big real ale man like many Knotters. The key reason for joinging is to get better photos and closer to the action - as Capa said "if it's not good enough you're not close enough"..
I always ask people why they chose particular regiments. Some were introduced by friends, others were literally born into theirs (the Knot's been around for 40 years), and others decide because they simply "feel” Cavalier or Roundhead.
I'm one of those whose conscience determines their flag. King or Parliament? Well, that's probably where I shared a sense of danger with photojournalists embedded with the military in Iraq.
One day I would like to publish a book of these pictures, and finally write that book on the period. So it's lucky the Newcastles, a fiercely-proud Royalist regiment, didn"t discover my Roundhead sympathies. You know, I'm lucky I didn't meet a premature end with my head on a spike….
