Exposure settings for better sunset pictures?
- Thread starter madmanjustice
- Start date
The P3S is incredibly stable, which allows for long shutter speeds, much longer than one would expect from a flying camera. On the other hand, its sensor is quite noisy, so - to begin - I suggest you to shoot in Manual mode and set the ISO to 100, then change the shutter speed until you get the exposure you want: if the sun is still high and you're shooting straight at it (bright image), you will want EV to probably stay above 0 or everything else in the photo will be underexposed; if the sun is down (dark image) you will want a negative EV reading or the photo will come out overexposed.
If you are shooting stationary subjects, shutter speed can go as high as 1 or 2s, but for moving subjects, you will need a faster shutter, which means you will likely need to go higher in ISO to achieve the correct exposure.
Let the P3S stabilize into a hover, then take 2-3 shots and pick the best one. This will give you already much better straight-out-of-the-camera results than shooting in full Auto mode. You might want to take multiple shots at multiple exposures, so you have a wide range to pick from.
If you know how to tweak photos in post-processing - I don't - then usually people go for very flat profiles (Dlog color, negative sharpness, contrast and saturation) and shoot in RAW in order to get the maximum out of the sensor.
One last thing: for very low-light shots, turn off the front LEDs or you might get reflections in the photo.
EDIT: apologies for the edits, but I realized some stuff needed to be rephrased.
If you are shooting stationary subjects, shutter speed can go as high as 1 or 2s, but for moving subjects, you will need a faster shutter, which means you will likely need to go higher in ISO to achieve the correct exposure.
Let the P3S stabilize into a hover, then take 2-3 shots and pick the best one. This will give you already much better straight-out-of-the-camera results than shooting in full Auto mode. You might want to take multiple shots at multiple exposures, so you have a wide range to pick from.
If you know how to tweak photos in post-processing - I don't - then usually people go for very flat profiles (Dlog color, negative sharpness, contrast and saturation) and shoot in RAW in order to get the maximum out of the sensor.
One last thing: for very low-light shots, turn off the front LEDs or you might get reflections in the photo.
EDIT: apologies for the edits, but I realized some stuff needed to be rephrased.
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If you're using auto mode, set exposure compensation to -1.0 or -2.0 to preserve highlight details in the sky and sun. The ground will appear dark, a bit of brightening using a computer could help but it would still be noisy.
The best option would be to bracket shoot: 3 or 5 pix with a 1-stop difference between them and stitch the photos together in Photoshop or Hugin. The Litchi app can do the bracket shooting automatically, I'm not sure if DJI Go has this.
The best option would be to bracket shoot: 3 or 5 pix with a 1-stop difference between them and stitch the photos together in Photoshop or Hugin. The Litchi app can do the bracket shooting automatically, I'm not sure if DJI Go has this.
Yeah I am using the AEB settings in the go app. They work nice. As mentioned then you can go back and pick the best or stich together.
