Tree Swallow

This was a seriously underexposed photo that was taken against a cloudy sky. In the process of brightening it up somewhat so detail could be seen in the bird's feathers the sky went completely white. Hence its rather graphic look. It is indeed, however, a real photo. A few seconds later he swooped past my head in an attempt to drive me away from his nest box and the trail that went past it. It always startles me when a bird makes that type of dive, but then that's why it works...grin.

I took a lot of photos of flying swallows that day and this was the best one of the bunch. Autofocus didn't work fast enough and neither did actually trying to follow them in the viewfinder. Finally I simply started looking over the top of the viewfinder with the lens focused on a spot about 20 feet in front of me. Whenever a swallow flew into that area I'd start snapping. Probably took 500 photos that day and discarded 499 of them.

Thanks everyone. The day was very overcast and dark, so I had to increase the ISO a lot to get the shutter speed high enough to stop these swift birds in flight. Still, I managed to seriously under-expose this photo and it took a lot of processing to get it to turn out. The sky, of course, went seriously white, but there wasn't anything I could do about it.