Battlefield Photography (historic, that is)

Photographing old battlefields is one of the more challenging things I've tried as a photographer. They're all different, and for the older ones, photographers may have been working at them for 100 years or more. Gettysburg is like that -- how does one take an original photograph of Gettysburg.
This subject comes up because in a week I'm heading down to Antietam for my fourth visit (my second in the past 12 months.) I'm still trying to sort out my approach to Antietam (I sort of somewhat got a handle on Gettysburg.) The thing is, all battlefields are different. Gettysburg has lots of monuments; Antietam has fewer. The monuments can either be an interesting subject, or an impediment because they weren't there when the battle was fought and get in the way. But then, the roads were different (rarely paved), the fields had different crops, the woods have been cut back since then or have grown out, the homes have been lived in and renovated. We'll never see Antietam or Gettysburg the way that Alexander Gardner or Mathew Brady saw them, other than through the wet plate images they took after the battles.
Some of what I do draws on what I do when shooting architecturals. For example, use wide angle settings (the wider the better) and get right up at the thing you're shooting. Vary your height, either shoot down low or get on a ladder and shoot from above (Ansel Adams had a platform on top of his car for this purpose.) Wide angle landscapes are frequently boring because everything ends up too far away, so don't waste too much time shooting these. Experiment with using telephoto settings for the forshortening effects. Don't stop with one shot, circle your subject looking for a better angle and framing. Look for the unusual juxtaposition. For example, this shot of Little Round Top, taken from the Devil's Den, is ok but a little boring:

But this shot includes the Pennsylvania monument on the top of the Devil's Den with Little Round Top in the background:

Now I apologize for the artifacts in the sky, I need to do some more post processing and back off the color saturation a little on this one.
And here's a close in shot of the most interesting part of the monument of the 11th Pennsylvania:

And yes, people leave cookies for "Sallie" to this day.
Since the light wasn't cooperating, and the statues aren't really that colorful, I converted this shot of the monument to Major General John Reynolds (killed the first day) to black & white:

But for this shot, of the monument on the location where Reynolds died, I left in color with the saturation turned up a little bit:

But this is all driven by the presence of the monuments. I'll talk about other battlefield situations in another posting.