I’ll admit that part of the reason I like this image as well as I do is the degree of difficulty involved in getting the shot.
Swallows are small and very fast which makes for a difficult flight subject. For years I’ve tried getting sharp, well-lit, frame-filling images of them and failed miserably. My best shots seemed to have one or more of the following issues – soft, too small in the frame for good detail, poor head turn or no light in the eye. But the most common flaw was poor light on the underside of the bird. So I decided to change my tactics – yes, I’m a slow learner at times…
Cliff Swallow
1/2500, f/6.3, ISO 800, 500 f/4
It finally dawned on me that to consistently get light under the bird I had to shoot when the sun was very low, morning or evening. But when the sun is that low the light is also relatively weak which means higher ISO’s and apertures that provide less depth of field. To help mitigate that problem I took off the teleconverter (at times swallows can be relatively easy to get close to) to give me a little more light, faster shutter speeds and more responsive autofocus.
And it worked! I got this shot and several others I liked on the first morning I tried the new tactics. Don’t get me wrong – swallows in flight are still extremely challenging (on this morning I took about 600 shots to get 3 or 4 I was pleased with) but at least it was now possible. Another lesson learned…
Ron
You are amazing!
Wonderful image and a great lesson learned-and passed along…thank you for doing that Ron. We all have learning curves to scale, in my case it’s more like a steep climb, so I appreciate the that you pass on these experience you realize in the field in hopes that we all become better photogs. But I’m not referring to you in the last sentence Ron, you’ve arrived and I think of you as the Photo Zen Master!
Exceptional!
One morning when I was in Colorado to visit family I found a path that went under a small bridge where swallows were nesting. They would leave the bridge area, fly around, land in a nearby tree, and then return to the bridge. Even knowing their approximate path, I was unable to get any shots nearly as nice as the one you posted. All this to say …. great shot and I admire your persistence.
Echoing everyone else. I really like the angle, and the movement in this shot.
That is an extremely cool shot!
Very cool shot. This last summer I found some small wet and muddy patches where two species of swallows were gathering mud balls for their nests. I’d lay down on the ground nearby and hope they’d return so I could photograph them. It was during my lunch break, so I didn’t have the time to be patient. I hope to try again next year with more time and better evening or morning light.