Night Time Help!?

[bmoore1118]

I have a very cool park close by that is lite very nice for Christmas. I would like to get some good night shots. I went out once and tried using the smart photo mode and it worked pretty well but even in lightroom with a raw file it blew alot of the highlights out. I thought DJI did something special with their smart setting for night?

Also I usually used hdr bracketed photos instead during the day. How slow of shutter speed can this drone take and not look bad?

Thank you for any help.

 

[Dave Maine]

The rule of thumbs for still photographers is 1/2 the focal length of the lens. A 24mm lens would require at least 1/12 sec. Obviously folks get by with longer exposures, but your risk of blurry images increase the more you deviate. This is doubly true for blended multiple exposures where the blending of slightly out of focus images creates ghost images.

 

[Ralph thompson]

With the M2P I've got good stills down to 1/5 sec (attached) but suggest the following; don't wait until its dark, the golden moments and the nicest photographs are between sunset and end of civil twilight (approx 30mins after sunset). In this time frame, you may get a red sky, you still have some light so it won't just a silhouette with blobs of light but you'll see the ground. Attached were take between 15 & 20mins after sunset last week in Montreal. I prefer manual exposure settings because then if it exposure isn't good you can easily add more ISO whatever. Try to keep ISO to minimum but u will have to increase it as u approach end civil twilight. At 15 mins after sunset, start with max aperture f2.8, ISO 200 and 1/5 sec shutter speed. If it blurry increase shutter speed and ISO in equal amounts. Use exposure bracketing but shoot raw, then in post, just select the exposure value that looks best and work with it in Lightroom/Camera raw whatever u use. When you shoot at this time, you don't need HDR because the ideal shoot will occur when the sky exposure and the lights are similar exposure values.

 

[Bsnyder]

Nice photos, and thanks for sharing this information, will be of much help.

 

[Yaros]

I have a very cool park close by that is lite very nice for Christmas. I would like to get some good night shots. I went out once and tried using the smart photo mode and it worked pretty well but even in lightroom with a raw file it blew alot of the highlights out. I thought DJI did something special with their smart setting for night?

Also I usually used hdr bracketed photos instead during the day. How slow of shutter speed can this drone take and not look bad?

Thank you for any help.

In no-wind situation you can go into pro mode and set the ISO to 200 or 400 and then experiment with the shutter speed.

 

[dronertv]

I was out the other night testing this very thing. I was trying to see if I could get a clear 8-second exposure. The best I could do was this 5-second exposure. ISO 100.

There was little to no wind. I have a lot of photos that were blurry, especially the ones that were taken higher up.

 

[Bsnyder]

Thanks for sharing nice photo.