Cliff Swallows are highly belligerent and pugnacious toward others of their own kind, especially when gathering nesting material but almost any time will do.
When Cliff Swallows are gathering mud for their nests a peaceful and constructive activity can turn into mayhem in a nanosecond.
Most bird photographers who try to photograph swallows in flight give up in frustration and I tried for several years before doing exactly that. They’re just too darned fast and erratic in the air.
I don’t believe that I photograph any species more pugnacious than the Cliff Swallow. Their combative nature can lead to some interesting photo opportunities but they’re so darned quick that doing it well is very difficult.
Swallow flight shots may be my most challenging subject overall. Their flight patterns are fast and erratic and it’s very difficult to get light under their wings.
This post is a bit of a change of pace for me – a fledgling Cliff Swallow, one the more common birds in North America.
For years I tried to photograph swallows in flight, usually without much strategy – just shooting them wherever I might find them. That typically meant while they were freely flying overhead or buzzing the surface of a pond or stream as they picked off insects and it always meant failure on my part. They’re just too fast, too small and too maneuverable for my autofocus and reflexes.
Then one day I decided to change strategies…
Cliff Swallows are one of North America’s most social land birds. Their nesting colonies sometimes consist of up to 7,000 individuals. Originally they were birds of the western mountains where they nested under horizontal rock ledges in canyons and foothills but 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 swallow (any species) flight shots and I’m no exception. But their small size combined with their swift, erratic flight has always stymied me. Until last May I didn’t have a single legitimate “keeper” of any swallow 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. 1/3200, 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. 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. 1/2500, 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. 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….
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…
