so ive been flying my mini 3 pro for a few months now and honestly the video looks great but my still photos keep coming out looking kinda flat and overexposed when im shooting midday. i shoot in auto mostly because i was nervous to mess with the settings and make things worse but at this point auto is clearly not cutting it.

someone at my local flying spot mentioned shooting in manual and using something called the exposure triangle but honestly that conversation went over my head pretty fast. im not a photographer by background, i just got into drones because i thought the aerial perspective was cool and now im trying to actually make the shots look decent.

any advice on where to even start with manual settings for bright sunny days? do i just crank the shutter speed up or is there more to it than that

yeah midday sun is rough, even for people who know what they're doing honestly. the big thing for stills in bright conditions is to drop your ISO as low as it goes (usually 100 on most drones) and then push your shutter speed up to compensate. something like 1/1000 or even 1/2000 on a really bright day can help a lot with the blown out sky problem.

also ? and this is the one that changed everything for me ? shoot in RAW not jpeg. i know it sounds like more work because you have to edit them after but you get so much more information in the file to work with. you can pull back highlights in lightroom way more than you ever could with a jpeg. a washed out RAW file can often be saved, a washed out jpeg is usually just gone.

the other thing is just honestly try to shoot golden hour when you can. i know thats not always possible but the light is just so much more forgiving and you'll stop fighting the sun the whole time.

im in the same boat as you and just figured some of this out recently so take this with a grain of salt lol. but what helped me was just putting it in aperture priority mode first instead of jumping straight to full manual, that way the camera handles the shutter and you just worry about one thing at a time. from there i started messing with exposure compensation (the +/- setting) and just dialing it down like -0.7 or -1 when things looked too bright. feels less scary than full manual and the shots got way better almost immediately