Should I give up on the Air's camera for stills?

Deleted member 94047 · Aug 24, 2019

I know that the Air doesn't have the best of cameras. And I am not going to rant about it, I knew what I was getting when I bought it. Plus my main interest is videos, and it shoots great videos. So, all good. No regrets. But since I have a flying camera, I have tried - again and again - to see what I can get out of it shooting stills. Now, admittedly, my pictures are poor when it comes to subject matter and framing. That is something I should work to improve. My issue is with the grainy, noisy pictures I get. There is no detail. Should I just give up on the Air for photography and just stick to shooting video? Or should I just give up on my own ability to take/make good pictures? What am I doing wrong? Why are my pictures so dull? Is it my editing skills that are lacking? May be I should just get myself an M2P/ seriously thinking about this last one. But then again, if I am a lousy photographer, what difference would that make? I would still be a lousy photographer with a more expensive kit churning out the same dull, boring images. Ok, this is turning to a rant /STOP.

EDIT: To mods, I wasn't sure whether to post this here or in the Mavic Air section; feel free to move it there if you think it doesn't belong here.

cyeung · Aug 24, 2019

Those are some very nice views! I have a Mavic Air as well, and here's a few things I do:

Shoot in RAW. That will get you the widest colour palette available.
Bracket your exposure. You want one "at exposure," one underexposed, and one overexposed.
Use sharpen / noise reduction (in Lightroom, that's in the Detail pane)

At exposure:

Overexposed:

Underexposed:

Result:

Kilrah · Aug 24, 2019

Yep, shooting and post-processing RAWs is very much necessary to get decent results out of it.

Deleted member 94047 · Aug 24, 2019

@cyeung: I do shoot in RAW but I haven't tried AEB yet, I will give it a try next time. Sharpening/noise reduction is also something I haven't really put an effort into. I tried it a few times and couldn't really understand what it was doing. I will add that topic in to my 'to read' list. Thanks for the tips!

Meta4 · Aug 24, 2019

Doppler said:
@cyeung: I do shoot in RAW but I haven't tried AEB yet, I will give it a try next time. Sharpening/noise reduction is also something I haven't really put an effort into. I tried it a few times and couldn't really understand what it was doing.

Raw or jpg won't make much difference, and neither would bracketing, since proper exposure isn't the problem.
Your subject matter is never going to show sharp detail with a small sensor camera.
Rather than shooting a vast scene with thousands of fine distant details and soft vegetation, get in closer to just a few things with sharp detail.
This isn't shot with the Air but it's an example of the kind of distance and subject you should try if you want your images to look cleaner and sharper: