not sure how to explain this exactly but a lot of my footage and photos just look like... drone shots. like you can tell immediately they were taken from above and theres nothing interesting about the angle or composition. ive seen some peoples work where it feels almost cinematic and you have to look twice to realize its aerial. mine just look like i hovered at 100 feet and pressed a button which i guess is literally what i did.

im not asking about camera settings really, more like the actual art side of it ? how do you decide where to position, what angle, how high, all that stuff. feels like theres no rules to learn so im kind of lost on how to improve

honestly this is something a lot of people dont talk about enough ? most beginners think the hard part is the flying or the settings but composition is where it really gets interesting. one thing that helped me a lot was to stop thinking about altitude as a number and start thinking about it as a relationship between your subject and the background. like sometimes 60 feet looks way more interesting than 120 because you can still see texture in whatever youre shooting over.

also try not to always shoot straight down or straight forward ? those two angles get used constantly and yeah they look drone-y. tilting the gimbal to like 45 degrees and flying at a low oblique angle can look really different. and leading lines are huge from the air, roads rivers fences anything that pulls the eye through the frame. i basically spent a few months just studying landscape photography composition and then applied all of it from above, that approach helped more than any drone-specific tutorial

what helped me was actually looking at my shots and asking myself "what is this even a photo OF" ? like if i cant answer that in one word then the composition probably isnt there yet. sounds dumb but it made me a lot more deliberate about finding an actual subject before i even took off instead of just flying around hoping something looked cool from up there