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When the rowan berries turn red, the swifts start feeling it's time to leave. Before you know, in few days, gone they are.

A flying swift is one of the most challenging targets for a photographer, especially if you are using a sluggish compact camera. Fortunately, the digital shots are cheap and you can always delete the frames with nothing but sky and perhaps a couple of fuzzy tail feathers. An important trick is to turn off the autofocus and set the manual focus somewhere between 10 metres and infinity. At release the camera is faster without the focusing delay. Even more important is that you prevent the camera from scanning focus from empty sky causing perfect out-of-focus, you can not keep the target in the middle spot of the finder anyway.

So, zoom out and follow your target, if it is not too far showing too small, and if you can keep him near the center for half a second, release now. In the resulting frame he will be in the far corner and, if you are lucky, all the members included. Shoot lots of frames, select the good ones.

Finally, I used Gimp to crop and modify the frames a little. Against the sky the black bird tends to look like a silhouette, so why not make them silhouettes.

The swifts have left the building, the photos are taken. Looking forward to next summer to see you again.

All the pictures on this page:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Risto Latva

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