so ive been flying my mini 3 for about 8 months now and i feel like my video footage is getting pretty decent but my still photos on sunny days always come out looking super blown out and flat. like the sky looks okay but everything on the ground is just this muddy washed out mess.

i know i should probably be shooting in manual but honestly everytime i try to dial it in while also flying i end up either fighting the sticks or messing with the camera and doing neither well. currently just leaving it on auto and hoping for the best which clearly isnt working lol. is there a starting point people use for like a sunny day at 11am kind of situation? or do most of you just shoot raw and fix it in post

also separate question but does anyone use ND filters for photos or is that more of a video thing

yeah the blown out issue on bright days is super common, auto mode on these drones is really optimized more for keeping highlights in the sky than preserving ground detail. what helped me most was just picking a base manual exposure before takeoff and sticking with it ? something like iso 100, f/2.8 or whatever your fixed aperture is on the mini 3, and then dialing shutter until the histogram looks roughly centered. takes like 30 seconds on the ground and then you dont have to touch it mid flight.

and yes shoot raw, always shoot raw for stills. the jpeg coming off these cameras is pretty aggressively processed and you lose a lot of latitude to recover shadows and pull down highlights in lightroom. raw gives you way more to work with even when the exposure isnt perfect.

ND filters are mainly video yeah but some people use a polarizer for stills which can help cut haze and make colors pop a bit more, especially near water. i dont bother personally but ive seen nice results from it.

honestly i just shoot everything in dlog or whatever the mini 3 equivalent is and deal with it in post. the flat picture profile looks terrible straight out of camera but you get so much more dynamic range to play with and the highlights dont clip nearly as hard. it took me a while to get used to editing a flat image but now i wouldnt go back

the other thing that made a huge difference for me was just changing when i fly. like early morning before 9am or late afternoon the light is just completely different and you dont have to fight the exposure nearly as much. sounds obvious but i used to always go out at like noon because thats when i had free time and my photos were always garbage compared to the golden hour stuff