But he photographed the landscape, including an area near to where the Charge of the Light Brigade – made famous in Tennyson's poem – took place. The photograph does not show the actual location of the charge, which took place in a long, broad valley several miles to the south-east. In letters home soldiers had called the original valley "The Valley of Death", and Tennyson's poem used the same phrase, so when in September 1855 Thomas Agnew put the picture on show, as one of a series of eleven collectively titled Panorama of the Plateau of Sebastopol in Eleven Parts in a London exhibition, he assigned the troops'—and Tennyson's—epithet, expanded as The Valley of the Shadow of Death with its deliberate evocation of Psalm 23, to the piece.
