so ive been flying for about 8 months now and i feel like my footage is getting better but one thing that still drives me crazy is the sky always looks completely washed out when im exposing for the ground. im using a mini 3 pro and shooting in D-Log M which i thought would help but honestly im still struggling to get a balanced image without the horizon just going completely white.

ive tried using the ND filters that came with it and that helps a little with the motion blur stuff but doesnt really fix the exposure issue between the ground and sky. do i need a graduated ND or am i just messing up my settings somewhere. i feel like every photo i see from other people looks perfect and mine look like i took them with a disposable camera lol

graduated NDs are genuinely a game changer for this exact problem. a hard grad probably wont work great from the air because your horizon line is rarely perfectly flat and straight across the frame, but a soft graduated ND makes a huge difference. i use a 3-stop soft grad on my air 2s for like 80% of golden hour shots and it just balances things out naturally.

that said, honestly the bigger thing that helped me was just learning to expose more intentionally in post. if youre shooting D-Log M you have way more latitude than you probably realize ? try pulling your highlights down aggressively in lightroom before you do anything else, like drag that slider all the way left and youll be surprised how much sky detail is actually in there. the washed look is often recoverable, people just give up too early and reach for the saturation slider which makes everything worse.

oh man i had the exact same issue for ages. what helped me was just shooting during golden hour when the dynamic range between sky and ground isnt as insane. midday sun is brutal for this, like the sky is so much brighter than everything else theres almost no saving it in post. also someone told me to try bracketing exposures and blending them which i havent done yet but apparently thats what landscape photographers do all the time