I have been trying off and on for the last few years, to take good photographs of small birds in flight. I have even at times thought that it is almost impossible to get the kind of results that I want with any consistency because cameras are just not capable of it, but of course, that's not true. Today I managed a lot more success by setting up the camera in a much different way. The problem is that having a fast  shutter speed of at least 1/4000 of a second and a depth of field that is not too shallow (because small birds so easily move out of of the point of focus), you need to adjust the sensitivity of the camera, which in digital cameras is called ISO, in old film slr cameras it was asa. To achieve the high speeds needed and also to attain a depth of field that is going to give success…and today I had more success at  f9, you need to have the ISO set to around 2000. But the problem with that is that there is such an annoying amount of noise on the image that it looks awful. Today I managed to set the camera up to avoid most  of this  noise which was a revelation, a eureka moment  and I am very pleased with the results.