ok so ive been flying for about 8 months now and my footage and photos are still coming out kinda soft and blurry looking, not like motion blur exactly but just... not crisp? i shoot mostly landscapes and some real estate stuff on the side. im using a mini 3 pro if that matters.

i've tried messing with the shutter speed but honestly i don't fully understand the relationship between that and the drone movement. like when im hovering the shots look better but the moment theres any wind or i pan it all falls apart. also shooting in auto everything which maybe is the problem lol

any advice on what settings i should actually be dialing in? someone mentioned the 180 degree shutter rule to me at my local club but i couldn't really follow what they meant by it in practice

the 180 rule is basically just a starting point for video but a lot of people apply a version of it to stills too ? idea is your shutter speed should be roughly double your frame rate if you're shooting video, so at 30fps you'd want 1/60. but for photos specifically you actually want to go much faster than that to freeze any movement. with a drone i usually wont go below 1/500 for stills if there's any wind at all, sometimes 1/800 or even 1/1000 if its gusty.

the auto mode thing is almost definitely part of your problem. the camera doesn't know you care about sharpness over exposure, so it'll drop the shutter to let in more light without asking you. switch to aperture priority or full manual and lock your shutter speed first, then let ISO float up a bit to compensate. you'll get some grain at higher ISOs but that cleans up way easier in editing than blur does.

yeah i had the exact same issue when i started out and it turned out half my problem was actually the ND filters i was using ? had the wrong ones for the light conditions and it was forcing weird shutter speeds. not saying thats definitely your thing but worth checking if you're running any NDs

also one thing nobody told me for ages: make sure EIS or whatever stabilization assist setting is turned on in the app, sounds obvious but i had it switched off by accident for like two weeks wondering why my hover shots still looked shaky