good capture Pineture3 looks as if it is flying through a hurricane with the position you caught the wings

Well done! Amazing shot; it looks like a fighter jet speeding across the sky. :)

For future reference, here is how I did it:

I found that walking through the field stirred up enough bugs, that the swallows would swarm around me. This gave me plenty of subjects to shoot at. Whenever things slowed down, I would start walking again, and a few seconds later, the swallows were back circling.

I used a telephoto lens, at about 200mm. I had the cammera set to the sports mode, but also tried shooting in the shutter priority mode at about 2000/sec and above, with a 400iso. That way I had enough light to shoot at fast speed. I then followed the bird with my camera WITHOUT LOOKING THROUGH THE VIEWFINDER. When I first tried to shoot through the viewfinder, I would lose the bird quickly. Later I tried the approach of pointing the camera in the bird's direction while keeping my face close to the viewfinde. I found I could fairly well track the bird, while keeping the camera pointed in generally the right direction. I lost about 1/2 my shots because the bird was not in the frame. The majority of the other half, had the bird out of focus, because the lens and camera could not autofocus in time to get a good shot. I was fortunate to have a CF card with a lot of space, (enough for 1K pictures), so I could shoot multiple bursts at high speed without concern. About 1 in 100 was a fairly good shot, but that was enough.

I was surprised how small the bird appeared in the frame, even with the telephoto, but a focused shot with a good lens, enables you to crop the picture fairly tightly and have the final product still be acceptable.

Very impressive, Alex! Bravo! Great capture of the barn swallow. There are a lot of violet backed swallows in the area where the great blue herons are nesting, and each summer I wonder if I'd ever be able to capture a shot of one of them, but have my doubts. As you say, they fly amazingly fast.