You aren’t tired of my posts from my magical morning at Fort De Soto, are you? Well, this is the last one. This last series is from North Beach, where I found some Barn Swallows flying over the mud flats. I enjoyed playing with the amazing autofocus on my R5. Swallows are really hard to to photograph in flight, but either this camera is awesome or my skills have improved! ;-)

You can see how the swallows feed on the wing. Look at him open his mouth to grab a bug in mid-air.

I post-processed these in Topaz to remove noise and increase sharpness, and I lightened up the shadows a bit in Lightroom. I’ve never gotten such clear images of swallows in flight before! Too bad they didn’t have a soft blue ocean background instead of brown mud flat!

Here’s the downward wing stroke…

This last one made me chuckle. Apparently the swallows don’t just eat on the wing, they also dispose of their waste in mid-flight. Take a look at his backside and the little white dropping that he emitted!