16th Annual Antietam Illuminary

Note: How you see the night images all depends on your monitor's settings. If they appear too dark, you may want to adjust the brightness on your monitor.

Illuminaries around the Maryland Monument. My photos do not do this event justice. They fall short of the visual and emotional impact of actually being there. The right time to be there is a half hour before sunset. The illuminaries are lit, but they do not look like it. As the sun sets they start to glow like the stars becoming visible in the heavens above. When darkenss settles over the fields they are a light and it is indeed breath taking.

The Dunker Church. This small modest white-wash church was the focus of the morning phase of the battle. It is ironic that the German Baptist Brethern - called Dunkers because of their practice of full immersion baptism - were ardent pacifists. The fiercest and bloddiest single day of the American Civil war would be fought in their fields and the wounded, dying and dead will fill their homes, churches and barns. Later, many would be buried in their fields.

Artillery at the New York State Monument. What a special privelidge it was to have free reign to walk around the field amongst the thousands of illuminaries. I felt like I was walking amongst the souls of the fallen and sometimes it was a little overwhelming. To see the 23,110 casualties represented by an equal number of candles is very powerful. I have walked this battlefield dozens of times, but when it is among thousands of candles each representing a fallen American soldier it gives one an entirely new perspective. I used a small pocket flashlight to illuminate the canon.

Artillery Hell, A Confederate artillery battery just east of the Dunker Church takes on an abstract quality. This image is the result of a fortunate accident. I was framing the shot in almost total darkness when my finger pressed the shutter release. Instead of just letting the camera point at the gound I moved it around in a small pattern for the twenty seconds I had the shutter speed set for. The above is the Photoshop UN-manipulated result.

No photo eassy of the annual Illuminary event would be complete without a tribute to the volunteers that make it possible.

Illumiaries at the ready, A single small candle is placed in a bag with sand in the bottom to act as weight and a secure base for the candle. The ones pictured here are ready to be positioned near the Maryland Monument and Dunker Church. The illuminaries are prepared weeks in advance of this event. The battlefield is divided up into small sections and boxes of illuminaries are distributed to the volunteers in charge of setting up each section. Setup starts at 9:00 AM and the illuminaries are lighted starting at 3:30 PM.

Volunteer Army It takes over 1200 volunteers from the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, church groups, ladies groups and others to set up and deploy the twenty-three thousand one-hunderd and ten illuminaries over the northern half of the battlefield from the Bloody Lane to the North Woods. Each illuminary represents one human casuality - killed, wounded, or missing - that fell during the September 17, 1862 battle. The single bloodiest day in all of American history. Four times the number of American casualties that fell at D-Day.

Maryland Volunteers Church group volunteers setup the illuminaries around the Maryland Monument. Without the dedication and help of these volunteers there would be no way to hold this event and pay such a tribute to those who sacrificed so much on that landscape turned red in September of 1862.

Troop 1097 The flag of Boy Scout Troop 1097 flies proudly next to the monument to the 124th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry.

These photos have not been manipulated in Photoshop beyond color balancing. They have been presented full frame. Most exposures at night were between thirteen and twenty seconds. Film speed was set at 200 ISO. I hope that you have enjoyed this look at this annual Antietam event, the most moving of the year. Cars begin to line up for this event around noon. The event does not start until 5:30. By that time the line of cars waiting to drive through the park stretches over four miles. This is the most well attended event at Antietam each year. I hope that one year you will be able to attend this very special and beautiful evening.