Critique Blue Tit in Flight

[Compuwight]

I have been trying for ages to get a Blue Tit in Flight, they are so fast and flighty and tend to appear as the light fails to feed their young. Nikon D500 + 500mm PF
After trying various settings I settled on 1/1600th f6.3 and pushed ISO to 2200. A heavy crop and Topaz Denoise to tidy a bit. Focus is not as would like and needs work !
Getting focus is hard as AF simply cannot keep up, so I pre focus manually and wait for the bird to enter my 'zone'

 

[u8myufo]

That`s not a bad capture at all Steve, what you have to realise though is that in a situation like this the bird is going to put a sudden surge into taking off. That will make things a bit harder, I may have upped the iso to increase ss as the D500 is more than capable of handling it and then relied more on the frame rate to get one or two sharper images.