High Angle with James

Last Saturday I drove out to a reservoir about 45 minutes from my house. I'd scouted it on Google Maps and it looked incredible from above — there's a long curved dam, some dead trees sticking up out of the water on the east side, and open fields behind it. Golden hour was supposed to hit around 7:15 pm and I got there at 6:45 thinking I had plenty of time. I did not have plenty of time.

Getting There Early Actually Matters

By the time I walked out to a decent launch spot, checked the airspace on the app, ran through my pre-flight, and got the drone in the air, I had maybe 12 minutes of real golden light before the sun dropped behind the tree line. I knew intellectually that golden hour is short but I really underestimated how fast everything changes. The quality of that light literally shifted like every two or three minutes. Next time I'm getting there an hour early minimum, getting everything ready, and just waiting. Don't be like me and rush your setup.

Camera Settings I Was Messing With

I shoot in manual on the camera when I can. For this session I was running ISO 100, f/2.8, and I was adjusting shutter speed as the light changed. The rule of thumb I've been using is shutter speed at double your frame rate — so if I'm shooting at 24fps on video that's 1/50th, but for stills I've been going a bit faster just to keep things sharp when there's any wind. Out at the reservoir there was a pretty steady breeze coming off the water so I was keeping it around 1/200 for photos.

One thing I want to flag for anyone else shooting with the Mini 4 Pro — the ND filters make a huge difference and I feel dumb that I didn't use them for the first two months I owned this thing. I picked up a set of Freewell filters (the all-day set) and I had the ND16 on for most of the golden hour shoot. It let me pull the shutter speed down and get that slight motion blur in some of the water that looks really nice in photos. Without the filter in that light I was having to jack the shutter speed way up and everything looked a little clinical and flat to me.

Composition Stuff I'm Still Figuring Out

Honestly composition from the air is something I'm actively struggling with and I don't want to pretend I have it figured out. What I'm trying to practice is the same stuff you'd do with any camera — rule of thirds, leading lines, looking for natural framing — but it's weirdly harder to see from above at first. Your brain isn't used to that perspective.

At the reservoir I was trying to use the curve of the dam as a leading line and I think some of those shots actually came out decent. I pulled the drone back and up to about 80 meters so I could get the full curve in frame with the water on one side and the fields on the other. The long shadow the dam was casting across the water in that light was something I wasn't even planning for and it ended up being the best shot of the session. So I guess part of the lesson there is just fly around and look at what's actually happening in front of you, not just what you planned in your head before you got there.

I also tried some shots directly overhead looking straight down — the nadir shots — at the dead trees coming up through the water. That texture looked really cool in the golden light but I still feel like I'm not getting the framing right on those. The trees are spread out kind of randomly and I couldn't figure out the right altitude to capture them in a way that felt intentional rather than just random. Work in progress.

Editing When You Get Home

I shoot RAW (DNG files) pretty much always now. When I first got the drone I was shooting JPEG because I didn't really edit photos and I thought it was fine. It's not fine. The RAW files have so much more latitude when you're recovering highlights or pulling up shadows and at golden hour you have both happening at the same time — the sky is really bright and the ground is getting dark. In Lightroom I was pulling highlights way down, lifting shadows, and bumping clarity just slightly. I also dropped the whites and brought the blacks up a bit to keep it from feeling too contrasty.

Color-wise I'm keeping it pretty natural. I see a lot of drone photos online that are way over-saturated, especially the oranges and yellows in golden hour shots, and I'm trying not to do that. I boosted saturation like 8-10 points at most and then used the HSL panel to pull the orange hue slightly warmer and nudge the luminance on the yellows up a bit. That felt more like what it actually looked like standing there than the hyper-orange stuff you see everywhere.

One thing I'm not sure about yet is sharpening. I've been applying some sharpening with the masking slider pulled way up so it's mostly hitting edges and not adding noise to the sky. But I honestly don't know if I'm overdoing it or underdoing it. If anyone has opinions on that I'm genuinely curious what your workflow looks like in the comments.

What I'm Taking Into the Next Shoot

Get there way earlier. Have the ND filter already on when I leave the car. Spend the first ten minutes just flying around and actually looking before I start trying to capture anything. And honestly — check the weather more carefully. The sky was pretty flat on Saturday, just a thin haze on the horizon, and I think the shots would've been significantly better with some actual cloud texture up there to catch the color.

I've got another location I want to try that has an old railroad bridge over a river valley. I'm going to try to time it for a morning with some fog in the valley. No idea if I'll pull it off but that's kind of the whole point — figuring it out as I go. I'll write about it when I do.

Thanks for reading. If you're newer to aerial photography like me and you've got tips or things you've learned the hard way, drop them below. I'm definitely not the expert here, just sharing what I'm working through.