Stairs to the water battery at Fort Washington. An active military base from just after the Revolutionary War to post World War II, there's a tremendous amount of history at the fort. It guards the river approach to Washington DC.
TFC, Thx for some of the story. It had to be a scream being there & taking in all that happened there. I shot our local version (Battery Russel), but it was elec, and finding much detail on the emplacement was not easy. 'Preciate your posting & sharing the history.
The depth of field is impressive, in focus from the foot of the stairs right to the gun emplacement. Presume you had the aperture well stopped down to achieve this? Not sure what the light was like that day but perhaps the picture is a bit dark and flat (? underexposed) but this ominous quality does suit a military installation.
The weather that day was very overcast, and the lighting was extremely flat. You can see from the sky it was dense clouds. I didn't want to pump the contrast up too much to block up the shadow areas. As to the aperture, it was I believe f16, at around 1/60th of a second, maybe 1/30th.
I understand. It's often hard to tell lighting from a photo. I could see the sky was overcast but there is bright overcast and dim overcast (we are very used to overcast skies in the UK!).