so ive been flying my mini 3 pro for about 4 months now and honestly most of my footage looks pretty decent when I shoot early morning but whenever I try to get shots during like 11am-2pm everything just looks blown out and kind of flat. I know golden hour is the thing everyone says but I cant always fly at 6am you know

I was shooting in auto mode for a while and recently switched to manual but im honestly not sure what settings to dial in for harsh midday sun. I tried dropping the exposure compensation down but then the shadows get really muddy. been shooting in the standard color profile too, maybe thats part of it? someone mentioned ND filters to me but I have no idea which ones to even get for that kind of light

any advice would be really appreciated, im mostly shooting landscapes and some real estate stuff

ND filters are gonna be your best friend here, seriously. for midday bright sun you're probably looking at an ND16 or ND64 depending on how intense it is. the idea is to follow the 180 degree shutter rule ? so if you're at 30fps you want your shutter around 1/60, and without an ND filter the camera just cranks the exposure up to compensate which is what's giving you that washed look

also switching to D-Log or at least the flat color profile will help a ton with recovering highlights in post. standard profile kind of bakes everything in and you lose a lot of that highlight detail. takes a bit more work in editing but way more flexibility. for real estate stuff especially you want to be able to pull those bright windows back without the whole sky turning white

Freewell makes decent affordable filter sets if you dont want to spend a fortune starting out

im kind of in the same boat lol, just started shooting real estate and midday is basically the only time my clients want it done. gonna try the ND filter thing based on what the above person said. one thing that helped me a little was just trying to position so the sun is more behind or to the side rather than shooting into it, sounds obvious but i kept forgetting and wondering why everything looked terrible