Drone Photography - Episode 10

Welcome to The Drone Workshop my name is Gio Castilhos with Airflow Creations and this podcast is dedicated to helping you to make the most out of your drone. Listen to the full podcast at https://linktr.ee/airflowcreations

This episode is about photography. It's a very interesting subject in drones because a lot of drone pilots do not understand very well photography when they start. And then they end up having to deal with it, and this is something that I will I really wanted to get into because I have some friends that might be interested in listening to this episode. I hope that it brings value everyone.

So just going over some of the factors that affect photography while are you flying drones. I separate them into two big chunks in my mind. I have the controllable factors, things that I can do and I can set up for in the settings in the camera, Then I have to variable factors which are things that I can't really do anything about, other than compensate for them. But they're just variable to each situation.

Let’s start with his variable ones that I think influence the photography. The first thing is the light. How much ambient light you got? Are there heavy shades? You can't really control of the light especially in drone operations because it's usually outdoors. right?

The target area, the subject something that you can't really control. How big something is, whatever you are targeting with your photography. You also don’t have control over the wind speed which affects a lot photography. Especially when you're doing long exposure shots. When I go over the camera settings you will understand a little bit how the wind affects the photography.  

You also have your state of mind. Are you nervous? Are you happy or sad or stressed? Sometimes the final results has everything to do with the way you were feeling, how you are feeling. On top of that, you also have their outside distractions, like dogs and people, police, neighbors, whatever you have to deal with when you are flying your drone. Maybe equipment laying around, your concerns about step on it or whatever happens.

What about the interference level? Antennas can affect data latency, resulting in a break up on my communications with the aircraft. Flight time this is not a typical factor in art photography (exceptions). It's a constant challenge for drones because you always counting against the battery life.

You also have screen luminosity on whatever device you are using compared to the light outside. You might be using goggles or whatever using as a device to see a good reference to determine the best settings for the camera.

There are other variable factors that affect drone operations, I will not into much more details, but then you have the controllable factors, which are things you can actually make a choice on. So, let’s start with the distance that you are from your subjective is also something that will affect your composition. The flight altitude also can change the composition on the shot and that you can control. You can control the angle as well.

Now inside the machine you have things like the file size. You can choose whether you doing the large format or a small format, the resolution,

Then you have three main factors. The shutter speed, aperture and ISO,... So now, this is actually what people get confused by and of course this is very challenging for me to put information out there about these things in podcast, as I am doing the audio experience, and it is a little hard to explain to somebody over audio, so I was trying my best to keep it simple as possible. So, if there's anything here that I say helping you, I am very happy already.

So let's talk a little bit about the effects of some of them. All of the three aspects are directly related to the light, how much light you are getting into the camera. The goal is to get the perfect light, not too light or too dark. To avoid overexposing, as it gets too bright, you would compensate by adjusting the sensor in one of these three elements.

Your goal is to keep this triangle in balance. So let's start with the ISO. That's one side of the triangle. It simulates the effect of film sensitivity to exposure (when it was an actual film more grainy).So, you can go from ISO 100 up to 2000 depending on the camera using. A typical drone would have something about like ISO 100 to 3000 or 6000, it goes crazy up there. Although the ISO is something you want to keep as close to 100 as possible, preventing graining off of your shot. That's not something you can negotiate on. You got to keep the ISO at 100

OK, so now the second  thing is the shutter speed. If you do photo, you can change the shutter speed. If you're doing video, you're not going to change the shutter speed because the speed is directly related to your frame rate, or frames per second. So you get the perfect motion blur, but don't worry about all these terms, if you don't understand what I just said. Listen to the next episode of the Drone Workshop and I'm going to talk a little bit about the videography in drone operations, and I will be talking about the shutter speed in the settings to match the frame rate.

Let’s say you are doing both video and photos, so you take a couple shots, you either not going to change the shutter speed or you are going to change that, to match the video frame rate. What you to do is to change the setting every time you switch to take a picture, and vice versa.

You would do this if want a picture to look in a certain way and you were willing to stop filming and do the resetting on the shutter speed. The shutter speed controls how sharp an image is, so when you were flying a drone, normally you would want as sharp as possible. On the DJI it goes from 8, which is a positive number 2/2000 or something like that, which is a little of 2000. That's a shot happening real fast. The problem with that doing that fast, is that you don’t end up with that much light. If you do a mechanical speed of eight seconds open, a lot of lights going to come thru the lenses, as well as gonna get a little bit blurry.

Sometimes that's what you want. I'm just explaining shutter speed here, meaning if you want to be either matching your video frame rate or if you are doing a more advanced photography and you will you will you go to change that. If you are doing advanced photography I would assume that you understand very well about shutter speed as you're going for a long exposure.Again, usually not gonna touch that because you're doing video and your shutter speed is matching the frame rate.

OK so that's another thing that you are not going to be concerned about changing, when doing video. A 24 frames per second frame rate on your video would require a 1/48 shutter speed. A 30 frames per second video requires a 1/60 shutter speed. A 60 frames per second video requires a 1/120 shutter.

In my case, because I'm using the phantom 4 pro, I have a wide range of options to change the aperture (f-stop). The f-stop has a relationship to the depth of field on the scene. It means how large the focus is around your subject, and how blurred the background compared to your subject in the forefront, for example.

To be focusing on “everything”, the largest number of the f-stop, the more “wide” the focal length. The DJI Phantom 4 Pro has an aperture of 2.8 up to 11. So you would like to get as close to the F/11 as possible. However you get minimal light on those settings of ISO 100, 60fps to shutter speed of 1/120 and aperture of 11. It's really dark.

So you're going to have to bring the aperture down as much as you can, all the way to 2.8, if that's necessary. This means things are going to get a little bit out of focus. Everything seems out of focus, then you need to be very careful to your focus point. Then, instead of doing a manual focus. Wall decor

OK so this kind of sums up a little bit of the drone photography, I know a lot of this is kind of mumbling on the audio and would probably be faster to just show you guys visually, but sometimes I say something and it resonates with you, maybe what you need to hear and I am so very happy to be sharing this information with you guys.

I hope it's helpful. Thank you for listening to The Drone Workshop, before I go I just would like to invite you guys to attend one of our workshops here in Culver City, at the Airflow Creations office studio. I usually post my events on eventbrite, so you look up online forThe Drone Workshop to get the tickets out there, they are very affordable.  I'm just trying to get the word out there as it gives a lot of information in a more structure in a visual presentation style.

Usually people walk out of there with so much of their hands. I try to share everything that I know to anyone that walks in the door. The second thing that I want to talk about is our store. It is called largewalldecor.shop where we sell our framed pictures through it, so I would love to see you guys checking it out. Go out there and it's ready and framed ready to ship. Largewalldecor.shop has amazing aerial views of LA and other cities.I will be updating that store as well to bring everything that I end up printing.

If you can support me with this one, go to the Amazon and look for the Above Construction: Drones in property development.If you have an interest in this area, The book is very affordable. A book that you can buy from Amazon, it is my perspective. I made it through research on this so that I could have the information on how to apply to drones in construction and how to use drones for the survey.

For the owner for the contractor and all parties that end up getting benefited from drone operations. I really would love to hear your thoughts on that and see if liked it.  But yeah, that's pretty much it, again, my name is Gio with the Airflow Creations. I appreciate very much your time, thank you for listening to this episode, let me know your thoughts, let me know your questions, and I meet you up on the next episode of The Drone Workshop. Thank you very much have a nice week!