so ive been flying my mini 3 pro for about 6 months now and honestly the flying part i feel pretty comfortable with but every time i try to shoot during golden hour my footage either looks washed out or way too dark and i cant seem to find that sweet spot. i know the basics like lower ISO to reduce noise and all that but when the light is changing so fast i feel like im always chasing it and missing the moment while im fumbling with settings.

right now im shooting in auto everything which i know is probably the problem but manual mode feels really overwhelming when im also trying to not crash. anyone got like a starting point they use for golden hour that i can just dial in before i take off and then adjust from there? or do you just shoot log and fix it in post?

yeah auto mode is definitely fighting you during golden hour because the camera keeps trying to expose for the bright sky and everything else goes dark. what helped me was locking in my settings before the sun gets close to the horizon when the light is still relatively even. i usually set ISO to 100, shutter to double my frame rate so if im shooting 30fps then 1/60, and then just use the aperture or ND filter to control exposure. on the mini 3 you dont have aperture control so ND filters are kind of essential, grab an ND16 or ND32 for golden hour depending on how bright it still is.

shooting in D-Log M honestly changed everything for me even though the footage looks terrible straight out of the drone. the dynamic range you get means you can actually pull detail out of both the highlights and shadows in post which is exactly what you need when the sky is bright and the ground is dark. takes some practice in lightroom or premiere to grade it but there are free LUTs all over the place that give you a decent starting point.

honestly same boat as you a few months ago. the ND filter thing the other person mentioned is real, i kept skipping it because it felt like extra gear to carry but once i got a cheap set off amazon it made a huge difference. also one thing nobody told me -- try to position yourself so the sun is kind of to the side rather than shooting directly into it, the colors on the landscape get way more interesting and you avoid that blown out sky problem a little bit. composition wise anyway not just a settings thing