ok so ive been flying for about 8 months now, mostly just recreational stuff but lately ive been trying to get into proper aerial photography. the problem is literally every shot i take looks kinda washed out and flat, like the colors just dont pop the way i see in other peoples footage online. im shooting on a mini 3 pro by the way.

i was shooting in auto mode for a while thinking it would handle everything but a friend told me to switch to manual and now im even more confused honestly. i dont really know what iso and shutter speed i should be setting for like a bright sunny day vs overcast. also should i be shooting in d-log or normal? i heard d-log is better for editing but when i pull it into lightroom it looks even worse than before lol. maybe im missing something obvious here

the d-log thing trips everyone up at first, dont worry. when you shoot in d-log the whole point is that it looks flat and grey straight out of camera ? thats actually what you want because it means theres more data for you to work with in editing. the trick is you need to apply a lut first before you do anything else in lightroom or premiere or whatever youre using. there are free ones made specifically for the mini 3 pro, just search for that and you'll find decent starting points.

for sunny days i usually keep iso as low as it'll go (100 on the mini 3 i think) and then use the 180 degree shutter rule ? so if youre shooting 30fps your shutter should be around 1/60. you might need an nd filter to pull that off in bright light without overexposing, like an nd16 or nd32 depending on how bright it is. honestly the nd filter thing made the single biggest difference for me, more than anything else.

yeah what he said about nd filters is spot on. i spent like three months wondering why my footage looked jittery and weird and it was because i was shooting at 1/2000 shutter to compensate for the brightness instead of just getting a polarizing nd. the motion blur from a proper shutter speed makes everything look so much more cinematic, it's kind of wild how much difference it makes once you see it side by side.

also for composition while youre figuring out the technical stuff ? try to find natural leading lines whenever you can. roads, rivers, coastlines. the drone height where it looks almost flat but you can still see depth is usually somewhere around 80 to 120 meters in my experience, sort of depends on the scene tho