so ive been flying for about 8 months now and i can get decent enough footage but my photos always look kind of flat and washed out when i bring them into lightroom. im shooting on a mini 3 pro if that matters. i usually just leave it on auto everything because honestly the manual settings intimidate me a bit but i feel like im ready to try and actually learn this stuff properly

someone at my local flying club mentioned shooting in d-log but then someone else said thats more for video and i got confused. do i need a specific picture profile for stills or is that a video only thing? and what about exposure, do most people use auto exposure or are you all manually setting ISO and shutter speed every shot

also any tips for composition would be great, i feel like my shots are technically okay but they never look as interesting as the ones i see posted here

the washed out thing is almost certainly your picture profile ? if youre in d-log for stills that would do it, d-log is really meant for video post processing and on a jpeg it just looks grey and sad. for photos i'd switch to something like vivid or even normal and then tweak from there in lightroom. also make sure youre shooting raw if you arent already, the jpeg processing from dji cameras is okay but raw gives you so much more to work with especially in tricky lighting

for exposure i do a mix honestly. in bright even conditions i let the drone handle it but any time theres a strong horizon or interesting sky i'll dial in exposure compensation manually at minimum, usually -0.3 to -1 stop to protect the highlights. you can always bring up shadows in post but blown out sky is basically unrecoverable

for composition just try the obvious stuff first ? leading lines, rule of thirds, look for geometry and patterns from above because thats what makes aerial different from ground photography. roads, rivers, rows of trees. the altitude gives you patterns you just cant see from the ground and thats the whole point really

i was in the same boat like 3 months ago and honestly the biggest thing for me was just starting to shoot raw. felt like a big deal to learn but lightroom makes it pretty approachable once you get into it. the washed out look i was getting was partly exposure and partly me not realising how flat raw files look straight out of camera ? they need that initial push in post before they look like anything

one thing nobody told me early on is to just fly at golden hour whenever you can. like the difference between midday flat light and that warm low sun hitting a landscape is insane, it kind of does a lot of the composition work for you because everything gets shadows and texture