so ive been flying for about 8 months now and my photos always look kind of flat and washed out when i shoot around midday. im using the mini 3 pro and honestly i thought just pointing it at something pretty would be enough but clearly theres more to it lol

i shoot in auto mode mostly because i was scared to mess with the settings and break something (i know, i know) but i finally switched to manual last week and now im just confused about which settings actually matter. someone at my local flying club mentioned something about ND filters and histogram but i dont really know what that means in practice. do i need to spend a lot of money on filters or is there a way to fix it in post?

also i noticed my shots look way better in the hour before sunset but i dont always have time to fly then. is there any way to make midday shots not look terrible or is golden hour just always going to be better

golden hour really is just better, no way around that honestly, the light is softer and the shadows are longer which adds so much depth to an image. midday sun is harsh and flat and even the pros struggle with it. that said you can definitely improve your midday shots ? the big thing is getting your exposure triangle sorted. keep your ISO as low as possible (usually 100 on the mini 3), set your shutter speed to roughly double your frame rate if youre doing video, and for photos you can be a bit more flexible but still dont let it creep too high or youll get noise.

ND filters are basically sunglasses for your lens, they reduce the light coming in so you can use slower shutter speeds without blowing out the highlights. for midday an ND16 or ND32 is usually where people start. Freewell and Kase both make decent sets that wont break the bank, you dont need to go crazy expensive. and shoot in raw, always raw, the jpeg files from these drones are processed in camera and you lose so much editing flexibility

oh man i was in the exact same spot like 4 months ago. the histogram thing really clicked for me when someone explained it as just a graph showing where your bright and dark areas are ? you basically want to avoid the data smashing up against either edge. if its piling up on the right side youre overexposed, left side underexposed. once i started checking that instead of just looking at the screen preview my photos got way better because the screen on the remote is hard to judge accurately in sunlight anyway

also composition wise something that helped me a lot was forcing myself to use the rule of thirds grid overlay in the app. i used to just center everything which looks kind of boring. putting the horizon on one of the horizontal lines instead of dead center makes such a difference, its a small thing but yeah