Taken at Patriot's Day Re-enactment at Lexington, Massachusetts. The battle began at dawn requiring me to shoot in manual with ISO 3200 (hence the grainy texture). This allowed me to shoot at speed around 160-200 as I was hand-holding a 300MM lens.
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The composition of the scene does depict the chaos of a battle reasonably well. But the impression I get first is of lots of pixelation and noise, like it was either very underexposed or cropped from a much larger image or both. It might look a little better in B&W or sepia, with selective burning of much of the pixelation on their coats.
This one looked rather interesting as a thumbnail but I see you have a lot of digital noise. If you want to make the noise work for you, try making the photograph sepia. Then noise turns into artistic grain. An effect I quite like. Incendently, as much fun as it is to go to these events, if there is smoke around, be wary of where the smoke is. Cameras & smoke don't always go together.
The noise in the image detracts from the overall shot. It would have been hard to capture with all the smoke around in the battlescene. The man in front of the shooter adds nothing to the image, except he gets in the way of the shooter. Of course, its not a composed shot, but one taken of the action, however it does affect considerably the overall image.
Nice variety of action in this reenactment image. Near the center of the image we have a distracting patch of bright color with magenta/green/orange speckles, consistent with chroma noise also seen in the blue coats and grass. I wonder if this is associated with a high ISO setting that might have been lower with a wider apeture and different shutter speed. Consider a salvage attempt with one of the many available noise reduction software approaches.
The gain effect is very dreamlike and an unusual application - much like early Civil war images only in color. The attempt to recreate the times using ISO and grain is a very good idea and in this case, it appears to have been a success. While some may view this as a huge mistake, it does work and combined with the action imparts a feeling of history viewed through a time machine. Probably not a high score image, in this reviewer's opinion, it is a unigue and very different way of processing for effect and in that sense, it works in fine fashion. Well done.
There is extreme amounts of noise in this photograph. Was this taken with a cell phone? ISO3200? This distracts severely from a photograph which isn't all that carefully set up to start with.
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