Crawford Notch State Park - Silver Cascade

Author's Comments

Most waterfalls make you work for them. Silver Cascade does not. You park on the shoulder of Route 302 and there it is, two hundred and fifty feet of water coming down the western slope of Mount Webster in tiers, the kind of drop that does not entirely register until you have been standing there for a minute. The accessibility is the thing people undersell. You can be set up with a tripod in five minutes. Late May is when I think it photographs best. The snowmelt is still feeding the upper tiers and the volume is real, but the surrounding hardwoods have leafed out enough to frame the rock face in green. By August the flow narrows and the cascade reads thinner, more delicate, which is its own kind of photograph if that is what you came for. Morning is the window. The sun comes over the ridge and lights the water without yet hitting the rock wall behind it, which means you can hold a long exposure without blowing out the highlights on the stone. Two seconds, four seconds, sometimes longer. The water turns to that soft vertical blur and the rock stays detailed and dark behind it. Without that shade, the contrast becomes a problem you cannot really solve in the field. Bring a polarizer. Bring something to wipe the lens, because the spray reaches further than you think on a windy morning. And do not stop at the wide shot. The middle tier, isolated with a longer focal length, is the photograph most people drive past on their way to somewhere else.

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