Drones and quadcopters offer a chance to capture stunning images in a totally new way, but there’s a lot to learn before you take that first flight.
Learn About Your Drone’s Capabilities
Before you even take to the skies, it’s essential to learn what your drone can and can’t do. You need to take time to thoroughly read the instruction manual, or your photographs aren’t going to turn out the way you want them to.
For instance, does your drone’s camera mount automatically stabilize each shot and adjust for different wind conditions? Does it have a preset selection of movements, and does it have a “follow me” mode?
It makes sense to learn to pilot your drone successfully before you even start to take photos, so spend a few hours learning to fly it. You’ll also get a good idea of how long the battery will last when you do this.
Check Laws and Regulations
It’s essential that you find out about any no-fly zones near where you plan to fly your drone. There’s a whole raft of new rules and regulations about flying any unmanned aircraft, so you need to check which ones apply to your area.
Preparation is Key
A successful shoot owes a lot to the planning and prep work you put in before you even turn your camera on. Scout the area you want to fly your drone over first. Are there power lines or other obstacles around? People? You need to know all the answers to these questions first, and decide what you will do in any possible scenario.
It’s a good idea to do a test flight without taking any photos first. Make sure you have plenty of extra batteries and anything else you may need.
Consider the time of day you plan to shoot. Early morning and late evening before the sunsets are traditionally the best times to shoot, as the light is soft and beautiful. You can get good photos when the sun is high in the sky, but it needs careful thought, as the shadows and contrasts are harsh at mid-day.
Get the Settings Right
This is where reading the instruction manual and learning to understand your drone will pay off. If you have a drone with a built-in camera mount, you will need to adjust the settings on the camera itself. If you want a drone with an on-board camera, you should choose one that lets you adjust white balance, exposure, frame rate and resolution.
A drone with smart settings is a great choice for photography and video. You can set a desired flight path, or pre-determined movements, and most have some sort of camera stabilizing feature which should help your shots come out sharp regardless of wind or other movements.
A tool that can benefit you is the over-exposure warning. These are known as zebra stripes, because they are diagonal stripes that appear in the preview of your image and highlight areas that will be overexposed if you take the shot with those settings. The warning allows you to change your settings to suit the brightness of the area you want to shoot.
Bracket Your Photos
Bracketing your shots is a great way to get the most out of your aerial photography. Bracketing means taking a series of shots simultaneously, but each has a different level of exposure. You will do some shots underexposed, some correctly exposed, and some overexposed. Bracketing will allow you a choice of the best-exposed images for the conditions, but it’s essential if you want to create HDR images in post-processing.
A HDR image editor, such as Aurora HDR, or Photoshop will take all the images of different exposures and merge them together into one image with a complete tonal range of highlights and shadows.
Use Direct Shots When Possible
It’s easier for beginners to get a shot that is directly in front of you. You can shoot at angles that aren’t in your direct line of sight, but this requires practice due to the advanced depth perception needed.
Keep your drone low in order to get the best shots while you are learning.
Use Raw File Format
If you are going to post-process your images, Raw format will give you much more scope to manipulate and adjust your images. This file format is uncompressed, meaning that all of the information contained in the image is recorded in the file. It means larger files, but the images are of a far greater quality than JPEG’s. You will need an Raw file converter to view your shots if you shoot in this format.
JPEG’s are great for quick shots that you want to view immediately on a computer or smartphone, but they are compressed and ‘lossy’. This means that the camera discards a good deal of the information in the image, unlike Raw format. Post-processing on JPEG’s is not ideal, as you don’t have the detail quality of a Raw or TIFF file, and JPEG’s degrade a little in quality each time you edit and save them.
Don’t Forget Post-Processing
Nearly all images will benefit from post-processing in an image editor. Even if all you do is adjust exposure, crop, color and contrast, the resulting image will stand out far more than one straight out of your camera.
Final Thought
Aerial photography offers us the chance to get images we could never have managed before. With just a little planning and preparation, you can soon be capturing and editing amazing images. Happy flying!
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