House Martins / Canon R6 Mk2.
24th August 2025
House Martins are quick, period! Frustratingly they also fly in a multidirectional manner, this may seem obvious, as all birds do over a period of time. However, birds like Swallows, Martins and Swifts do this very quickly and frequently. These erratic flight patterns make them very difficult to follow in a photographer's camera viewfinder. To have any success of photographing them in flight you have to use a particular modus operandi. It is very difficult indeed, almost impossible, without a huge slice of luck, just to point a lens and capture a sharp image.
To illustrate - one afternoon in Lesvos this spring, it had got far too hot to go birding so I was relaxing on the balcony of my hotel room just sipping a chilled glass of the very good and cheap (even better) local wine. I could see some Barn Swallows flying low and skimming the swimming pool, drinking water - a nice sight.
Another man staying at the hotel had obviously seen this avian spectacle and decided to position himself on a pool-side chair thinking he would try and capture them in flight, this was all very good. However, being side-on to these very fast flying birds as they came in presented a significant problem, and I thought that he had no chance whatsoever of any success. You just can't do it, by the time he had pointed his lens at an incoming bird and waited to achieve focus the bird was already twenty feet past him. He tried this method for about twenty minutes and gave up, and anybody would have experienced the same problem.
To have any chance of success you have to step back for a wider perspective which gives you an idea of the birds flight direction. Then you have more time to achieve focus by tracking the flight and if you can obtain focus early, which is critical, then for two or three seconds you have a chance of getting a few sharp images.
Back home in the Brecon Beacons there is a stone maintenance tower on a local reservoir, and House Martins have nested there for as long as I can recall. I was there yesterday on a cloudy morning watching these lovely birds flying back and fore their nests. I decided to have a try at capturing them in flight using my Canon R6 Mk2 and a Canon 100-500 f7.1 lens. I used the bare lens and the full frame camera setting, this gave me the widest perspective possible, this is important because to use the 1.6 crop factor in the camera and possibly a 1.4 tele converter would not only slow the lens down but give a much narrower field of view, making it much more difficult to track these birds.
I watched one particular bird's flight path, it's no good jumping from bird to bird, I obtained focus early on and just kept track of it until it flew nearer. Using 'back button focussing' is fundamentally important in this situation because if shooting conventionally (using the shutter button to focus and then fire the shutter) you will inevitably fire the shutter during tracking when focus hasn't been achieved. I just depressed the pre-programmed back button to track the bird's flightpath until it was in focus, and when it came nearer I fired the shutter button, thereby only firing when the bird was in focus.
This is the only method that works for me.
Shooting Info;
Canon R6 Mk2 + Canon RF100-500 f7.1 lens.
F7.1 / 5000 sec / iso 2000 / @ 20FPS
To illustrate - one afternoon in Lesvos this spring, it had got far too hot to go birding so I was relaxing on the balcony of my hotel room just sipping a chilled glass of the very good and cheap (even better) local wine. I could see some Barn Swallows flying low and skimming the swimming pool, drinking water - a nice sight.
Another man staying at the hotel had obviously seen this avian spectacle and decided to position himself on a pool-side chair thinking he would try and capture them in flight, this was all very good. However, being side-on to these very fast flying birds as they came in presented a significant problem, and I thought that he had no chance whatsoever of any success. You just can't do it, by the time he had pointed his lens at an incoming bird and waited to achieve focus the bird was already twenty feet past him. He tried this method for about twenty minutes and gave up, and anybody would have experienced the same problem.
To have any chance of success you have to step back for a wider perspective which gives you an idea of the birds flight direction. Then you have more time to achieve focus by tracking the flight and if you can obtain focus early, which is critical, then for two or three seconds you have a chance of getting a few sharp images.
Back home in the Brecon Beacons there is a stone maintenance tower on a local reservoir, and House Martins have nested there for as long as I can recall. I was there yesterday on a cloudy morning watching these lovely birds flying back and fore their nests. I decided to have a try at capturing them in flight using my Canon R6 Mk2 and a Canon 100-500 f7.1 lens. I used the bare lens and the full frame camera setting, this gave me the widest perspective possible, this is important because to use the 1.6 crop factor in the camera and possibly a 1.4 tele converter would not only slow the lens down but give a much narrower field of view, making it much more difficult to track these birds.
I watched one particular bird's flight path, it's no good jumping from bird to bird, I obtained focus early on and just kept track of it until it flew nearer. Using 'back button focussing' is fundamentally important in this situation because if shooting conventionally (using the shutter button to focus and then fire the shutter) you will inevitably fire the shutter during tracking when focus hasn't been achieved. I just depressed the pre-programmed back button to track the bird's flightpath until it was in focus, and when it came nearer I fired the shutter button, thereby only firing when the bird was in focus.
This is the only method that works for me.
Shooting Info;
Canon R6 Mk2 + Canon RF100-500 f7.1 lens.
F7.1 / 5000 sec / iso 2000 / @ 20FPS