Photographing swallows in-flight has been one of my favourite pastimes for a number of years now, but one that has come with a lot of challenges. Swallows can be swift and erratic flyers which can represent an exercise in frustration when starting on this journey. This article shares a number of photographs of swallows in-flight and discusses my journey with this subject matter over the past number of years.
Tag Archives: photographing swallows in flight
First Swallows of 2023
This article features a selection of images of the first swallows of 2023 to arrive in our area of Southern Ontario. During the past few years I’ve spent a reasonable amount of time photographing these pocket rockets with some success… so I was looking forward to their arrival this spring.
Pairs in Flight
While going through some older, unprocessed files yesterday, I came across some images of swallow pairs in flight. Since swallow season ended some time ago, I thought it may be fun to share these images with readers… and contemplate the arrival of these little pocket rockets next spring!
High ISO BIF Test
This article features a selection of handheld photographs from a high ISO BIF test that I did a couple of days ago at Biggar Lagoon Wetlands in Grimsby.
High ISO is a relative term and defined differently by many photographers. Since I often shoot my E-M1X up to ISO-6400, I consider ‘high ISO’ as values of ISO-8000 and above. The test images in this article range from ISO-10000 through to ISO-20000.
Make Swallows In Flight Easy
This article discusses how to make photographing swallows in flight easy through the use of technique and technology. Earlier this week I went out to the Biggar Lagoon Wetlands for about three hours with the intention to photograph swallows in flight. Suffice to say I had a very productive morning. After doing a quick cull through my resulting images I ended up with almost 900 useable images that I would realistically consider processing in post.
Leveraging Technology
New generation cameras can broaden our photographic potential, but unless we are adept at leveraging technology our potential stagnates. This article discusses the link between technology and our need to develop both physically and mentally.
Swallow Pairs in Flight
This article shares a selection of 22 images of swallow pairs in-flight, captured handheld during a practice session at Windemere Basin Park in Hamilton Ontario. Some of these photographs appear to be of mated pairs, while other images captured some aggressive interactions between the birds.
All of these photographs were severely cropped as the birds were not as close as I would have liked. I’m still trying to hone my eye/hand coordination with these pocket rockets. More practice is required before I’ll be able to get more pixels on subject birds in free flight.
Swallow Mid-Air Interactions
This article shares some images of swallow mid-air interactions that were captured during an extended swallow in-flight practice session. As noted in a recent article, my swallow eye/hand coordination was in desperate need of practice. So I recently spent over 4 hours at Windemere Basin Park photographing swallows in free flight using Bird Detection AI Subject Tracking with my E-M1X.
First Swallow Images of 2022
This article shares my first swallow images of 2022, all of which were captured handheld at Windemere Basin Park in Hamilton Ontario. It was a very blustery afternoon with wind gusts of about 70 kilometres per hour which made photographing swallows in free flight even more challenging.
I quickly came to realize that my handheld skills with this particular species were in definite need of some serious practice. So, I focused my photographic efforts with the use of Pro Capture H for all of the images in this posting. These photographs were all captured in about 90 minutes.
Pairs of Swallows
This article features a collection of handheld photographs captured with an E-M1X, all of which feature pairs of swallows in flight. Bird Detection AI Subject Tracking was used for all of the images in this article.