I needed to get inside Robert Capa’s head while on that transport on D-Day. I used the known Capa photographs from June 6, 1944 to construct a diagram that shows his position while taking those pictures, and to define the positions of the men and objects relative to each other. Capa was using his Contax II cameras with 50mm lens attached, which is generally accepted. He referred to “my Contax” in his memoir, and the frames have the characteristic intrusion of sprocket holes seen when film cassettes other than Zeiss are used in the camera.9
I used men and objects in the photographs as a length reference. Negative 32 depicts, among other things, two soldiers in the water, walking up to their knees toward shore. These are soldiers A and B, with A being the closest to Capa and B almost to the beach (Figure 1a). The average height of an American soldier at that time was 68 inches.10 Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man tells us that the leg (knee to floor) comprises one fourth of the total height of a man. Therefore, I assumed the visible height of each man in knee-high water to be 51 inches.
Figure 1a, Negative 32. This picture (along with negatives 30, 31 & 33, were taken from the ramp of the LCVP that Capa took from the USS Chase to Easy Red on Omaha Beach. Trigonometry was used to determine distances from Capa’s camera to men and objects. This forms the basis by which their relative locations and Capa’s movements were determined.
Figure 1b. Negative 33. The two hedgehogs are seen as well as the wooden ramp
I put digital files, obtained from the internet, of negatives 32, 35 and 37 into Adobe Photoshop and measured the vertical height of the frame in pixels between the upper and lower frame edges. I standardized all three negatives to a height of 2132 pixels. Using 27 degrees as the vertical angle of view of a 50mm lens, this gave me a reference to make other measurements, seen in negative 32 (Figure 1).
I then measured the pixel height of soldiers A and B. Assuming a right angle between the line of sight from Capa’s lens to their vertical height ending at their heads, the ratio of their height to the height of the frame gave me a factor with which I determined the angle they subtended in the photograph. I then subtracted this from 90 degrees to give me the complementary angle, 𝛳.
Using this information, I was able to calculate the distance to each man using the formula tan𝛳 = O/A, where A is the height of the object (ie, the soldier, 51 inches) and O is the distance to the man.
This yielded a distance from Capa’s camera of 61 feet to soldier A and 270 feet to soldier B, near the shoreline. To measure the distance to Tank 10, I applied the same formula to soldier C standing at the corner of the tank nearest to Capa. Tank 10 was 116 feet from Capa. Using this same method, I determined that the tank in the center of the image was 221 feet from Capa, and so forth.
With these measurements, I used the law of cosines to calculate distances that did not involve a right triangle. For example, I calculated the distance from soldier A to soldier B at 213 ft.
For negative 35, I applied the formula to the two Czech hedgehogs in the center and left foreground; the closest, hedgehog C,* was 36 feet from Capa (Figure 2). For this, I used the length of each arm of the hedgehogs of 36 inches.11
Figure 2, Negative 35
I applied the same process to negative 37 (Figure 3).
Figure 3, Negative 37. The distance to this soldier is not as precise as other distances calculated because this is a cropped image. The upper and right rebates (frame lines) were created by Tristan daCunha. This means that the actual distance to this soldier from Capa is probably greater than 13 feet, because I do not know the vertical height in pixels from frame edge to frame edge. What you see as frame edges were imagined and created by Tristan daCunha in his excellent analysis that examined whether or not heat can cause emulsion to run.*** The important part of this image, however, is the presence of the two hedgehogs in the background, and the wood ramp. These appear to be the same hedgehogs and ramp that are seen in Capa’s negatives 30 through 33 (Figure 1a & 1b).
Next, I created a PSD document in which 1 centimeter equaled 10 feet. Using Capa’s location on the LCVP,** I drew objects of interest, such as soldiers A and B, Tank 10, the hedgehogs, the shoreline, and the anonymous soldier in negative 37. I superimposed triangles that indicated the horizontal coverage of Capa’s 50 mm lens. I then positioned the triangles such that they would cover the objects as they appeared to him in the photographs (Figure 4).
Figure 4
I estimate that my measurements were precise enough to yield a 5 ft margin of error.
* May 23, 2025: I corrected a typo from A to C and added HHC to Figure 2 to clarify correlation with map, and correct a typo in Figure 1b.
** LCVP stands for landing craft vehicular personnel. Its dimensions are 10.5 ft by 36 ft.
***https://tdacunha.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Robert-Capa-and-the-mystery-of-the-lost-photos-2.pdf
10. Ambrose, S. (1995) D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of WWII. Touchstone/Simon & Schuster.
11. https://www.liquisearch.com/czech_hedgehog/technical_details