okay so ive been flying for about 8 months now and my photos just look... flat and overexposed a lot of the time. im shooting in auto mostly because i was scared to mess with manual but i think thats the problem. the sky always looks blown out even when the ground looks okay or vice versa. i shoot around golden hour which everyone says is the best time but i still cant seem to get it right.

someone in another thread mentioned histogram but i honestly dont know how to read it properly. is there like a simple starting point for manual settings or should i just shoot in log and fix it later? i have a mini 3 pro if that matters

the blown out sky thing is super common and it mostly comes down to exposure compensation and when you're shooting. auto mode tries to average everything out so if you've got a bright sky and darker ground it just kind of gives up and picks a middle ground that pleases nobody.

honestly the easiest fix before diving into full manual is just drop your exposure compensation like -0.7 or even -1 when you have a bright sky. it'll make the ground a tiny bit darker but you can recover shadows way easier in lightroom than you can recover a completely blown highlight. also shoot in raw if you arent already, jpg just throws away so much information that you actually need for this kind of fix.

log is great but i'd get comfortable with raw files first before adding that extra step into your workflow, otherwise you're just stacking complexity onto complexity

im in almost the exact same boat lol been at it maybe 5 months and the histogram thing confused me too for ages. someone told me to just keep the graph from touching the right edge and that's basically it for not blowing out highlights. sounds dumb simple but it actually helped me a lot more than reading long explanations about it