About the Image(s)

I took this image on June 13, 2025, in Weston, Massachusetts. I had gone to this quarry because a pair of Peregrine Falcons had been roosting there. I was standing on the opposite side of the pond looking for the falcons when I noticed these, presumably students from a local High School, emerging from the woods. I watched them for a while from across the pond and snapped this photo after the first person jumped. Eventually all three of them jumped into the pond, but the other two took quite a long time deciding “to jump or not to jump.”

I took the photo with my Sony Alpha 1 with a 300 mm lens and a 2x extender for a focal length of 600 mm. The settings were 1/2000 s, f/5.6, and ISO of 1000. I had been hoping to photograph falcons in flight, but those camera settings worked fine for catching this jumper mid-jump, with his friends looking on from above.