Swallows in flight

When I walking on the beach this morning at Barns Ness there was a group of swallows swooping around the sands. Fortunately I had my 200mm lens with me and decided to take on the challenge of trying to capture them. Not and easy task as they fly by so fast. As on the whole I was trying capture them against bare stretches of sandy beach the autofocus was amazing responsive though as usual with capturing birds in flight the hit rate can be very low. Still I was able to get about half a dozen reasonably sharp shots from somewhere in the region of 300 shots. Latterly I switched to high speed shooting which on my Canon D7 is about 8 frames a second and this can be enormously wasteful once you have lost your focus on the bird.

I’ve chosen to make a montage of my best shots rather than blow up one shot of what is essentially a fairly tiny bird. The only problem with this is the fact that the depth of focus on the background is also very small so the fact that all the bird are reasonably sharp looks a little unreal. Have a look at it LARGE if you want to explore this in greater detail.