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I’m suggesting not changing exposure at all during the take. Expose to the right for the brightest framing.
Yes, that's how I do it too. Should work in most cases
I’m suggesting not changing exposure at all during the take. Expose to the right for the brightest framing.
I’m suggesting not changing exposure at all during the take. Expose to the right for the brightest framing.
You seem to have missed my intent here- I am suggesting the scene be metered for the brightest framing and the exposure set at that point and kept constant for the whole take. The idea being that you can maximise the full dynamic range of the sensor. Blown highlights almost always look nasty, I agree absolutely. But why have blocky shadows when they might be avoided?That can be risky because the threshold where highlights are impossible to recover is much smaller than with shadows. The slightest increase in scene brightness will ruin your footage unless you like blown highlights. The M2P has decent enough DR that I personally would be doing the opposite. ETR helps with ISO performance but most of the time you are at base ISO anyway.
ETR was the go-to advice on much older sensors with horrible DR but things are better now.
You seem to have missed my intent here- I am suggesting the scene be metered for the brightest framing and the exposure set at that point and kept constant for the whole take. The idea being that you can maximise the full dynamic range of the sensor. Blown highlights almost always look nasty, I agree absolutely. But why have blocky shadows when they might be avoided?
ThanksThank you for this article. I just printed it for future reference.
Exposing to the right is critical for all sensors and all cameras. The idea is to fill your image sensor with as much light as you can stand WITHOUT clipping any highlights that are important. Doing this will deliver the maximum signal to noise ratio. You want to keep your signal as high off the noise floor as you can without clipping.With small sensors i usually expose to the left not right. Cant do much at all about blown highlights which look nasty, while shadows can be lifted at the cost of some noise which to me is much more acceptable. Ettr is largely a relic of when digital had very little dr and lifted shadows had horrible noise.
Im not saying people should burn their highlights in any camera. Im only saying that if you can carefully expose to the right and possibly sacrifice specular highlights, you will gain more shadow as a payoff.You are correct in theory but in practice it is very difficult to go just up to the point where you are not quite clipping highlights. In real life shooting with a small sensor you are almost always going to end up clipping highlights if you expose to the right. And sure, lifting shadows doesnt bring back detail that's not there in the first place, but there is usually SOMETHING there, which you can see better when you lift shadows. Look back to the early days when people were talking about exposing to the right, the reason for not exposing to the left was mostly because of how noisy the shadows got when lifted. These days that's much less of an issue, while there's still nothing you can do about featureless blown out highlights. I speak from experience, as a general rule exposing to the left is better with a drone's small sensor. Big sensor and/or very even, low contrast lighting, sure, expose to the right. To each his own, but for me, featureless blown,-out highlights look much worse than moderately underexposed shadows that have been lifted in post.
Depends on the situation, am I right?Depth of field is of no concern with such a wideangle lens in aerial photography.
Depends on the situation, am I right?
You are right but it would have to be a fairly extreme situation for it to matter with that particular camera and sensor.
In the case of the M2P you have a 1" sensor which even at F2.8 has the depth of field equivalent of F8 on a full frame camera just for an easy reference point. By F4 you have a full frame equivalent DOF of F11. In both cases, everything is going to pretty well be in focus under any typical flying situations. With such tiny sensors, DOF is generally far less of a concern, especially hundreds of feet in the air.
The 28mm equivalent lens on the M2P is also rather wide, and a wide angle lens makes it easier to get an entire scene mostly in focus. Provided the subject size (i.e. occupies the same proportion of the frame) and aperture remain constant, all lenses actually have essentially the same depth of field. What changes is the distribution of that depth of field around the focal plane. At very wide angles, depth of field beings with around 30% of the image in front of the subject being in focus to 70% of the image behind the subject in focus - as you increase focal length, this trends ever closer to 50%/50%. Longer focal lengths also compress the image and enlarge the out of focus areas of the background, which is due to a change in magnification. There are several factors that come together which contribute to our perception of sharpness.
The bottom line is that a 1" sensor behind a 28mm equivalent lens is pretty much going to have everything in focus all the time even at F2.8 unless you're flying really close to something.
Do you work with drones?
Do you work with drones?
hmm I too wonder about that. If those statements were true, why bother focusing your Mavic or mavic 2 Pro lol...
Focusing allows you to shoot very close subjects, or swap to more distant scenes instead of having it locked at just one focus setting like an old phantom.hmm I too wonder about that. If those statements were true, why bother focusing your Mavic or mavic 2 Pro lol...
They are true - there are lots of good resources if you have a further interest in the physics side of it as they apply universally and not specifically to the Mavic line. I understand that you don't like me, but your second comment was never implied so I am not sure what you're trying to get at there.