{"id":12895,"date":"2013-03-02T08:25:40","date_gmt":"2013-03-02T15:25:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=12895"},"modified":"2013-03-02T10:16:42","modified_gmt":"2013-03-02T17:16:42","slug":"cliff-swallows-in-flight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2013\/03\/02\/cliff-swallows-in-flight\/","title":{"rendered":"Cliff Swallows In Flight"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cliff Swallows are one of North America’s most social land birds.\u00a0 Their nesting colonies\u00a0sometimes consist of up to 7,000 individuals.\u00a0 Originally they were birds of the western mountains where they nested under horizontal rock ledges in canyons and foothills\u00a0but in the last 150 years their range has expanded to include most of the continent due to the construction of buildings, bridges and highway culverts that provide alternative nesting sites.<\/p>\n

But holy moly, are they ever difficult to photograph in flight!<\/p>\n

I suspect that most serious bird photographers have attempted\u00a0swallow (any species) flight shots and I’m no exception.\u00a0 But their small size combined with\u00a0their swift, erratic flight has always\u00a0stymied me.\u00a0 Until last\u00a0May I didn’t have a single legitimate “keeper” of any\u00a0swallow species in flight but that spring I was finally able to get some shots I like but it took some significant alteration of my past strategies.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"cliff<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a01\/3200, f\/7.1, ISO 800, 500 f\/4, natural light<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

One of my problems in the past was that the bird was nearly always shaded underneath.\u00a0 So finally it struck me (duh!) that I needed to be shooting them when the sun was very low – for me that meant early in the morning.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"cliff<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/2500, f\/6.3, ISO 800, 500 f\/4, natural light<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

But shooting flight shots just as the sun comes up provides another problem – sufficient shutter speed.\u00a0 At that time of day the light intensity is relatively low so I needed to be shooting at the effective noise limit of my Canon 7D – ISO 800.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"cliff<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 800, 500 f\/4, natural light<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0Another thing that helped significantly was shooting without my 1.4 tc.\u00a0 This allowed\u00a0for faster shutter speeds and quicker, more accurate autofocus for these little speed demons.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"cliff<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 800, 500 f\/4, natural light<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Another issue was depth of field – especially when the bird was turned sideways to me.\u00a0 But generally I find soft wings to be acceptable as long as the head and most of the body are sharp.\u00a0 Usually I try to avoid squarish crops but I had no choice with this composition.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"cliff<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/2500, f\/6.3, ISO 800, 500 f\/4, natural light<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

This image is probably one of my favorite shots of a Cliff Swallow in flight.<\/p>\n

Ok, now for some disclosure about these images.\u00a0 Sharp eyed observers may have noticed that all of these birds are looking in the same direction.\u00a0 There’s a reason for that…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"cliff<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/2000, f\/7.1, ISO 800, 500 f\/4, natural light<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

All of these shots were taken in a parking lot where the swallows were nesting beneath the roof of a picnic\u00a0pavilion.\u00a0 They were acclimated to the presence of vehicles and people\u00a0and since I was shooting from my pickup they weren’t disturbed by my presence.\u00a0 The\u00a0images I’ve presented here were all taken as the birds approached their nests in flight, which accounts for the fact that each swallow is looking in the same direction.<\/p>\n

There were so many birds flying into and out of their nests that at times the\u00a0air was filled with swallows, so in two of these shots there was part of another out of focus bird in the image.\u00a0\u00a0Significant cloning is something I nearly always avoid but in those two shots I chose to clone out part of a bird in the background.<\/p>\n

Swallow flight shots are still a work in progress for me but I’m happy to have\u00a0finally had some success.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cliff Swallows are one of North America’s most social land birds.\u00a0 Their nesting colonies\u00a0sometimes consist of up to 7,000 individuals.\u00a0 Originally they were birds of the western mountains where they nested under horizontal rock ledges in canyons and foothills\u00a0but in the last 150 years their range has expanded to include most of the continent due to the construction of buildings, bridges and highway culverts that provide alternative nesting sites. But holy moly, are they ever difficult to photograph in flight! I suspect that most serious bird photographers have attempted\u00a0swallow (any species) flight shots and I’m no exception.\u00a0 But their small size combined with\u00a0their swift, erratic flight has always\u00a0stymied me.\u00a0 Until last\u00a0May I didn’t have a single legitimate “keeper” of any\u00a0swallow species in flight but that spring I was finally able to get some shots I like but it took some significant alteration of my past strategies.   \u00a01\/3200, f\/7.1, ISO 800, 500 f\/4, natural light One of my problems in the past was that the bird was nearly always shaded underneath.\u00a0 So finally it struck me (duh!) that I needed to be shooting them when the sun was very low – for me that meant early in the morning.     \u00a0\u00a01\/2500, f\/6.3, ISO 800, 500 f\/4, natural light But shooting flight shots just as the sun comes up provides another problem – sufficient shutter speed.\u00a0 At that time of day the light intensity is relatively low so I needed to be shooting at the effective noise limit of my Canon 7D – ISO 800….<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,334],"tags":[68,542,865,105,146,187,230,544],"class_list":["post-12895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","tag-canon-7d","tag-cliff-swallow","tag-cloning","tag-depth-of-field","tag-flight","tag-iso","tag-nesting","tag-petrochelidon-pyrrhonota"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-3lZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12895\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}