Barn Swallow Photography: When the Camera Isn’t Enough

Moving beyond technology in bird photography

How far would you go to get better at something you love, especially when nobody else might even notice the difference?

I ask myself this often. My answer is always the same: Always test the limits.

Recently, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing with my birds-in-flight photography.

Always asking: How much further can I go?

The Easy Part is Already Done

Let’s be honest: if you set aside artistic considerations, modern cameras make capturing sharp bird-in-flight shots almost too easy.

The AI finds the bird, locks on, and tracks it. You can fire at over 50 frames per second, and you do not need to worry about the number of frames. What once demanded skill and endless practice can now be done by a novice.

For many species, the job is practically done for you, which means the challenge has all but vanished.

Finding the Edge

I’m always looking for that point where technology stops being enough, the point where skill has to take over.

That’s why, on my last holiday, I picked a subject that wouldn’t be easy on me: barn swallows. Sure, I have them at home, but I needed to remove all distractions and focus entirely on photographing them in their most challenging moment, when hunting insects.

Three days and over 2,000 photos later, I can finally say I’ve got a much better handle on how to capture them.

Why Barn Swallow Photography?

Barn swallows are small, about 16 cm (6 inches) long, and fly at 40–50 km/h (25 mph). That’s not unusual. The problem is their flight pattern while hunting.

It’s utter chaos. Sudden turns, sharp dives, constant changes in altitude and direction. At close range, you can barely track them with the naked eye, never mind through a zoom lens.

I already had plenty of swallow shots, but those were the “easy” kinds:

1. Take-off shots:  aim at a perched birds, or one leaving the nest and click as it launches.

2. High-sky shots: small in the frame, autofocus locking easily against the empty sky.

3. Water-drinking shots: straight, predictable flight paths that still look spectacular.

But easy was not the goal. I wanted to capture them mid-pursuit, twisting, turning, and weaving low over the fields.

Barn swallows taking off — just the warm-up

Getting Ready

To pull this off, I needed three things in place:

1. The camera: I chose the OM-1. Light, fast, which means manoeuvrable.

2. Observation: I studied the swallows’ hunting routes. They typically feed in clouds of flying insects that drift with the wind. There was no way I could predict their turns and twists -which mostly followed the insects they hunted - but after a while, I could read the bigger rhythm: where they entered and exited the insects cloud, and how long each loop took.

3. Zero Point: For the moment-to-moment chase, I had to completely empty my mind and "fly" with the swallows, tracking and hunting insects alongside them. Strange at first, but wonderful once you get used to it. I call this mental state my Zero Point, and this is the state I try to reach whenever I do nature photography, especially when I capture fast subjects.

The Plan

I started with a 150mm lens, a medium zoom lens that left the birds room to move in the frame, making it easier to follow them.

I started by tracking them against the sky: easy at a distance, much harder as they came closer. The goal was to keep them in frame long enough for autofocus to lock.

Once I could do that consistently, I moved to trickier backgrounds: remote treelines, then my real target, fields of flowers. This is where the autofocus often fails, even when the birds was in the frame for a an extended length of time, so I had to constantly nudge the camera to keep the lock.

Learning to keep the swallow in frame

After two days, I felt ready for the 300mm lens with a x1.4 teleconverter (420mm total, about 840mm full-frame equivalent). This magnified the challenge considerably. At four times the apparent size, a bird flying perpendicular to the camera 20 meters away would disappear from the viewer within one tenth of a second, well before autofocus could react.

At first, keeping them in view felt impossible. But with continuous practice, the impossible becomes normal, and eventually I could shift my attention to birds flying against complex backgrounds of plants and flowers.

Barn swallow hunting over a sea of flowers

Barn Swallow Photography: The Results

With the 300mm and a teleconverter, my first attempts at Barn Swallow photography were total failure. That is, zero usable shots. But within an hour, as I tuned into their flight rhythm, my hit rate climbed.

Now, about 10–20% of my shots are “good enough,” and maybe 1–2% are keepers. If you've never tried it, that might sound low - but I am thrilled.

The next challenge? Shifting from technical mastery to artistic composition, turning these technically solid shots into images worth hanging on a wall.

Barn swallow flying through the flowers