okay so this might be a weird question but bear with me. i can fly fine, my exposure is decent, everything is technically not terrible but when i look back at my footage or photos they all just feel kind of... boring? like its just a thing from above. doesnt have that feeling that the shots i see on youtube or instagram have.

i think its a composition problem but im not sure how to think about composition differently when youre up in the air vs shooting on the ground. like all the rules i learned for regular photography feel hard to apply when youre looking straight down or at a weird angle from 80 feet up. anyone else go through this phase and figure out what clicked for them

the thing that helped me most was stopping shooting straight down so much. like top down shots look cool occasionally but after a while they all blend together. try getting to like 60-70 degrees tilt instead of full nadir and suddenly you get foreground and background in the same shot which is way more interesting. leading lines also translate really well to aerial ? roads, rivers, fences, trails, any of that stuff draws the eye through the frame the same way it does on the ground, you just have to find it from above first.

also something nobody talks about enough is altitude. most people pick one height and stay there. try the same composition at 50ft vs 150ft and the whole feeling changes. lower feels more immersive and you get that sense of being in a place, higher starts to feel more abstract and graphic. neither is wrong, just different moods.

im kind of in the same boat tbh so ill be watching this thread. one thing i read somewhere was to look for patterns and symmetry from above because human eyes really respond to that ? like a parking lot or crop fields or a bunch of identical rooftops can actually look really striking from the air even though it sounds boring. the scale thing is interesting too, putting something familiar in the frame like a person or a car gives the viewer something to anchor to and makes everything else feel huge

my editing also changed a lot after i started watching breakdown videos on youtube, not drone specific ones even, just general lightroom stuff. i was way over-saturating everything before and it looked fake. pulling back on vibrance and being more intentional with the tone curve made a big difference for me