Photographing “Swallows” in Sukute

For me it is really interesting to take pictures. I had taken pictures of landscapes and flowers and sometimes animals and insects too. I have found it very hard to work with animals and insects. The smaller the organism harder it is to take pictures because the normal camera and lens are not meant for such work but this time as well I tried to take pictures of a migrating bird called “Swallow” with my 18-55mm lens. It is almost like trying to kill a lion with a bow and arrow. Swallow are really beautiful birds and they have got a stunning flight and crazy maneuverability in sky. They really defy physics of normal flight and I am really impressed by how they fly. One more interesting thing about a swallow is they build the nest inside a house with special kind of clay. I have photographed the newly hatched birds as well but I have never thought of capturing them on flight. I had one close encounter with swallow few years back. Since they make their nest in homes so they are not much afraid of humans. So those swallow were really flying very close to me when I was in the garden and they really flew near my ears and it was such an experience that you cannot express it in words. The experience was absolutely beautiful for a person who loves nature.

It was 11th January 2013 in Sukute (Nepal). The black and white colored swallow were flying with great grace and acrobatic maneuverability in air. It really felt very nice even watching them. My friends at the beach were busy talking about other things so I grabbed that chance to photograph those swallow. I know my pictures were not up to expectation of a professional photographer and neither have I posted them in a blog so as to show my photographic talent. I didn’t had good equipments nor any planning but after the shoot I magnified them and photoshopped them. I really had a very nice feeling of being able to capture them with such slow lens and with such low zoom capabilities. They were flying across the big river. It seemed as a feeding frenzy but I really don’t know what they were after but it was a beautiful feeling to be able to observe them flying gracefully across the river.

So here I have presented some of the cropped pictures of swallow flying in stunning speed. I think the word flying seem to be absolutely silly in comparison to their flight pattern. The proper word might be they were rocketing across the sky. Their flight beauty cannot even be compared with a modern rocket or with an airplane or anything. Their biological technologies were simply more advanced than all of those manmade flying objects. In fact they would seem pretty sluggish compared to their flight abilities.

May be some day we humans would also be able to build such machine with absolute accuracy and acrobatic flight maneuverability. For now I just enjoyed them flying with such beauty and grace it was really a blissful experience. Never did I think of them as such but when I saw them flying from the eyepiece of the DSLR camera then did I felt their speed and beauty of life. Surely that was an experience of my lifetime.