The Red Coats

With my Downton Abbey weekend last weekend, I've spoken quite a lot about the Battle Proms event I attended at Highclere Castle last July. It was a great event to take a camera to and I did indeed come back with many images I have used on the web from that day. Today's picture is another one to add to that collection, this one being taken fairly early in the afternoon before all the big displays and orchestra had begun. Although this was not a fully fledged battle reenactment like some of my English Civil War pictures, it is still a representation of history. If I remember rightly, it was a display of the English army during the time of the Napoleonic wars.

The red coat was the uniform of the British army for many, many years and actually began with the creation of the new model army of Oliver Cromwell and Sir Thomas Fairfax in 1645. Despite the new model army being disbanded in 1660, the red uniform carried on for more than a couple of hundred years and is often seen in Hollywood movies such as Zulu and The Patriot.

I processed this picture months and months ago so I can't remember if I HDRed it but I'm pretty sure I did. I've haven't tried to represent this is a 'moment in time' picture as it's pretty obvious it was taken during the modern day (what with members of the crowd huddled in the picture) but nonetheless I have tried to give it a bit of a historical flavour. As with my 'Timeless Torcello' picture, I blended this with a texture of rock from the Czech Republic, this one having lots of old writing written on it, which I knew I would want to use as a texture one day. Who knows, may even use it again or indeed many times.