Doane and Royalston Falls

At some point last week I decided I need to spend much more time photographing waterfalls, and Doane’s Falls in Athol, MA seemed a good place to start. It’s got two cascades topped by a stone bridge, and a lower fall besides. I didn’t get any of the upper fall that I liked, and I spent an entire afternoon shooting what turned out to be complete garbage. Undaunted, I marked up the shots to indicate what the compositions should have been, and headed out again later in the weekend a redux.

One thing I learned from my first, abortive attempt is that very turbulent rapids look silly in proportion to the length of the shutter setting. I had achieved peak silliness at about 1 second, so on day two I dialed it back to one half, one quarter, one tenth, and faster for all my shots, just to be sure I got something usable. I also exposure bracketed. In the end, I think I got some good ones.

Doane’s Falls Royalston, MA, lower falls
ISO 100 57mm f/5.6 1/250 sec

*Doane’s Falls Royalston, MA, lower falls*
ISO 100 56mm f/25 1/10 sec

*Doane’s Falls Royalston, MA, lower falls*
ISO 100 47mm f/14 1/25 sec

*Doane’s Falls Royalston, MA, lower falls*
ISO100 97mm f/25 1/10 sec

By early afternoon I was ready to sit down for some lunch, at about the time wife sent a text to express her regret at not having come with me. I assured her that I would be happy to wait where I was if she wanted to join me. We drove on up to Royalston Falls, about fifteen minutes further down the road, and only a short hike into the woods. I couldn’t get anything I liked of the falls themselves, because the near-certain death-danger of venturing past the wire rails to the icy precipices of the gorge didn’t seem a fair exchange for the photo I might get. Still, the geography around the gorge was full of moss covered boulders, trees with their roots splayed through fissures in the rocks, snow-frosted pines, and so on. This definitely is a place to revisit in other lights and weathers.