2025 has been very good year where we live and during the spring our regular visitors (the swallows) returned to one of our outbuildings. It is true they make a bit of a mess on the floor but its not much of a price to pay. (I have since, ready for next year, put up a shelf below the nest to catch all the "ejecta".)
Having recently discovered MFT (Micro Four Thirds) format I sold all my Sony equipment and moved to OM Systems. Many of my shots would simply not be possible on other cameras. Or perhaps to be more accurate, all the functions I have on my camera are not available on another single camera.
In some of the pictures you can see a blueish open door. We needed to prop this open else there would be a tragedy! But I wanted to narrow down their options and give me a better chance of grabbing a good shot. So I made a 3/4 door out of OSB and you can see it in the bottom part of the some of the images. They had no problem negotiating this. In fact, one of the ever-present hazards of swallows in the outbuilding was the chances of a collision when you went in. I've lost count how many time a swallow had skimmed off my head as I ducked under the low door to go in.
To get this series of shots I had the arduous task of sitting in my kitchen, with a cup of tea and the windows open, with my camera (OM1mk2 with 150-600mm lens) on a tripod, trained on the open door region of the outbuilding opposite. The OM1mk2 has an amazing function where a half press of the shutter release starts the camera collecting shots at, in this case 120fps. Then at the critical moment I press the button all the way down and it then stores up to 99 sequential shots.
I had noticed that after a swallow had flown into the outhouse they took about 15-30s to stuff the food in the chicks beaks before zooming our through the door. So I would watch a bird fly in, press the shutter release half way down, wait 15-30s, and then zoom they shoot out the door. At that point I press the shutter release all the way down. The birds are so fast that they were practically round the other side of the house before I was able to react. Because of this I set the parameters to keep all frames from before I pressed the shutter release (you can adjust it from 99 before you pressed all the way to 99 after you pressed). A lot of the time the birds would be in one corner or off the edge, but they flew in and out so often there was enough chances.
I chose particularly sunny days, I had to for exposure reasons, so I waited until after midday when the sun had swung round enough to illuminate the birds as soon as they emerged.
Taking the pictures head on was, I discovered, the only realistic proposition. I estimated that they were travelling at about 10m/s (10000mm/s) probably more. So in 1/1000s they would move 10000mm/1000 = 10mm! I used a range of speeds mostly from 1/4000s to 1/10000s and iso ratings of 1000 to 3000. Another excellent feature of the OM1mk2 is the noise reduction and makes the higher iso rating a actual possibility.