this has been bugging me for a while and im not sure how to explain it but basically every time i go back through my footage or photos from a trip i feel like they all look identical. like yes technically they're fine, exposure is okay, theyre sharp, whatever. but theyre all just... bird's eye view looking straight down or a slow pan at like 80 meters and after a year of flying i have hundreds of shots that feel totally interchangeable.

i watched some youtube stuff about composition and everyone talks about the rule of thirds and leading lines and i get it in theory but when youre actually up there flying i just kind of default to whatever looks safe i guess. not sure if other people hit this wall or if theres something more specific i should be actively thinking about before i even take off

editing wise im using lightroom and my presets are probably making everything look the same too now that i think about it, every photo gets the same treatment basically

honestly yeah this is such a real thing and i dont think enough people talk about it. i went through the exact same phase around the 8-9 month mark. what helped me was forcing myself to pick ONE compositional constraint before each flight ? like okay today im only going to shoot at 30 meters max, or today everything has to have a horizon line in it, or i have to find a natural frame with something in the foreground. sounds a bit artificial but it broke me out of the hover-at-80m-and-pan autopilot thing completely. also try flying at dusk sometime when the light is doing something interesting and you almost cant help but get something different because you have to react to whats happening rather than just executing the same moves

for editing, try processing the same RAW file three completely different ways just as an excercise. like one with cooler tones, one warmer, one with more contrast pulled back. its kind of eye opening how much the look is a choice and not just what the photo is

the preset thing is a trap for sure. i deleted all my saved presets about six months ago and just started editing each photo individually and it slowed me way down but the results got way more interesting. not saying thats for everyone but worth trying on like a small batch just to see what happens when youre actually paying attention to what each specific image needs