okay so this has been bugging me for a while now. I feel like technically my shots are fine, exposure is decent, footage isn't shaky, but when I look back at everything I've shot over the past year it all kind of blurs together. like every photo is just... a thing from above. bird's eye view of a beach, bird's eye view of a forest, bird's eye view of a road. it's all the same angle and same vibe

I see people posting drone shots that feel really dynamic and interesting and I genuinely cannot figure out what they're doing differently. is it just finding better locations or is there something compositional I should be thinking about more? I have a Air 2S if that matters. also wondering if part of it is my editing workflow because I tend to just do basic exposure and color correction in lightroom and call it done

the straight down nadir shot is a trap honestly, everyone does it because it feels unique from the ground but once you've seen a hundred of them they all look the same. try shooting at like 30-45 degrees instead of 90, you get foreground and background in the same frame which immediately adds depth. leading lines help a lot too ? roads, rivers, shorelines, anything that pulls the eye somewhere. you kind of have to think about it the same way you would a regular photo, the rules of thirds still apply even from 400 feet up

also don't underestimate altitude changes. sometimes dropping really low and shooting slightly upward at a treeline or cliff edge gives you a perspective that feels completely different from the standard high-and-looking-down thing

editing can make a huge differnce honestly. i was in the same rut and what helped me was actually spending more time in lightroom with the masking tools ? like selectively boosting the sky vs the ground instead of just adjusting the whole image. also started doing a bit of dodging and burning which sounds old school but it really draws attention to where you want it. for composition though i'd say just try to find something to anchor the shot, like a single interesting subject rather than just a landscape. a lone boat, a small cabin, something that gives the eye a place to land