Capturing Gettysburg

Mike Hullett visits the historic site of Lincoln's famous address with the versatile Tamron 18-270mm VC PZD lens.

Article by Jenn Gidman

Images by Mike Hullett

One of his favorite places to frequent is the Gettysburg National Military Park Museum and Visitor Center, which features exhibits and artifacts from the Civil War. Visitors to the museum can also stroll over to the battlefield and the Soldiers' National Cemetery, the burial ground for Union soldiers who died during the war. On his most recent trip, Mike discovered a section he had never seen before.

"They redid the museum a few years ago, and it's usually one of the first places visitors head to," he says. "When you're walking around the grounds of the park and cemetery, you usually see the large monuments, because those are what your eye is drawn to. This time, though, I was walking down the path to get to some of those monuments when I came across an unknown soldiers section. There was a small marker about 2.5 feet wide in the middle of the grass that I had to wander over to find. It simply said, 'Unknown 425 bodies.'" The other markers around it were really small, too, only about 6x6 inches each."

The Tamron 18-270mm VC PZD lens was ideal for Mike's day trip to the park. "I carried just my camera body and that lens, and it allowed me to be much lighter and quicker," he says. "You can take a driving tour around Gettysburg, but it's when you walk around that you see the really interesting stuff. Gettysburg is enormous - you do a lot of walking, so it's important to have a lens that you can carry around with you all day."

Using the 18-270 gave Mike the versatility he needed to show the statues and stone markers from a variety of perspectives. "It's the only lens I packed, because I knew it would be the only lens I needed," he says. "Having the ability to go from 18mm to 270mm with one lens let me experiment and take a lot of cool shots with different focal lengths all from the same spot."

A well-known Lincoln statue on the grounds of the museum was one example of how Mike was able to play around with different focal lengths. "Finding a nice composition often means fooling around with focal lengths like this," he says. "I like to do dramatic close-up shots, and the 18-270 helped me do that. To me, the most interesting parts about that statue of Lincoln are his face and hands. I was able to zoom in on both, which was really cool. The statue is so well done that you can see every line, every detail - you can imagine what he really looked like in real life."

The 18-270's Vibration Compensation feature meant that Mike didn't have to bring a tripod during his trip to Gettysburg. "All of these images were shot handheld with the VC on," he says. "I was really interested to see how that would work. You can tell how well it worked by the sharpness of the images I got, especially the close-ups. Some of the images of the rifles on display in the museum really show this. They're behind glass in a lighted case, so to be able to shoot through that glass and get such incredibly sharp images was cool."

Mike was able to get especially creative with his shots using selective focus. "Most of these shots were taken outside in daylight, and, depending on my subject and what I was trying to show visually, I could either close the aperture down to get more depth-of-field, or open it up as wide as possible to isolate the image from the background," he says. "The lens has quite a lot of capability that way."

Mike searched for the visual lines and arcs in the cemetery to draw the viewer into his images - even if that meant he had to find unusual angles to shoot from. "Whether they're natural or manmade, I look for those lines," he says. "It might be the curve of a tree, or the linearity of a fence."

Visitors might not even necessarily spot those lines and curves unless they try out different angles. "There was one shot I took of a line of grave markers while I was lying down on the ground," Mike says. "The markers are pretty well spaced out, probably a few feet apart from each other, so when you're standing upright, you don't see any kind of arc. But when I got down to the ground, I could get them all in a line. I was able to use a little telephoto with the 18-270 to condense them to make them look closer together. I focused on the second marker and had the rest out of focus, which I thought made the image more visually interesting."

Mike spent many hours in the museum and park, but the most appealing photo ops came for him as the day wound down. "I tried to get a lot of images in the late afternoon and early evening," he says. "For some of the pictures of the unknown soldier markers, they're complemented by the shadows of the trees and the other markers. Shadows always lend a really nice aspect to your images, so try to take advantage of them if you can find them."