so ive been flying for about 8 months now, mostly just messing around but lately ive been trying to actually get some decent footage and photos. the problem is every time i shoot around golden hour or even just midday with some clouds, the sky just completely blows out and the ground looks fine but the sky is basically white. im shooting on a mini 3 pro if that matters.

ive tried bumping down the exposure but then the foreground gets too dark and it just looks weird. a friend told me to shoot in manual mode but honestly ive been too scared to mess with that stuff. is there a middle ground here or do i just need to accept that i have to do HDR stuff in post? i feel like im missing something obvious that everyone else already knows

yeah this is super common and honestly the sky blowout thing tripped me up for a long time too. the short answer is you basically need to expose for the sky and recover the shadows in post, especially if you're shooting raw. if youre shooting jpeg only then you're kind of fighting an uphill battle because there's just not enough dynamic range to work with.

the thing that helped me most was learning to use the histogram instead of just looking at the screen preview. screen looks fine but histogram shows you what's actually clipping. once i started doing that i stopped trusting my eyes and started trusting the data, sounds dorky but it made a real difference. also if your mini 3 has the d-log m profile, use that, it preserves way more highlight detail even if the flat footage looks terrible on its own.

graduated ND filters are a thing people use for this exact problem but honestly for a drone it gets complicated because you cant physically rotate them mid flight the same way. most people just go the log + post route like the other person said. lightroom has gotten pretty good at pulling back highlights without it looking fake