Lessons

Lesson Info

DJI Go App: Photo Settings

I'm gonna walk you through some of the settings in the DJI GO app. So, I'm gonna fire up the drone, we'll turn it on, you'll be able to see what I'm seeing here on my remote controller. And then I wanna talk to you about some tips of what you can do to take good photos, how I approach a location when I'm new to it, and then I wanna show you guys a whole bunch of really cool photography from the community thanks to some good friends that are letting me share their work. And then we'll open up Lightroom and I'll do some editing and kinda show you how I approach my edits. And you guys can ask me questions. I definitely want there to be a dialogue, and we'll go back and forth on that, alright? So, drone photography. Before you guys can take amazing photos, though, we need to go over the settings. And we want to get our DJI app dialed in. We wanna make sure we understand what's happening on the remote controller. So, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna turn on both of these and then we're gonna ...

get started (clears throat). So, as you guys remember, I push on a DJI drone the power button once, let go, hold, and it boots up. (beeping) And the same thing with the remote controller. (beeping) And we'll just give it a moment to boot up, but I wanna just let you know that this cable that I have is not required. This is just so you guys can see what I'm gonna see on my screen, so don't worry too much about that. Waiting for this to boot up, and there we are. Pretty cool. So, no matter what drone you have, you're gonna have some type of welcome home screen like this. And you can go through some of the settings. You can look at how long you flew at a location from last week. They even have some helpful little articles and tutorials in there that you can check out. So, this is a great place to get a little bit more information. You can also get to the flight simulator. I don't know if you guys know that, but just like this same situation, you could turn on your drone, take the props off, and you could do the flight simulator and watch a drone on here fly around. It's like a video game. Great way to practice without going in the field. You see that I have a little prompt to do an update. I'm gonna move on, and I will do that later when I'm not doing a class live. And I'm going to just enter into my DJI GO app. So, click go fly. There goes that menu setting. It pops up. I usually just hit the X, but what you guys might wanna just pay attention to is does that IMU, does that compass, do all these setting say normal? Are we good? If you're good, then it's happy. Looks like I'm getting an issue. Was it radio channel? Did you guys see that? But I'm not actually taking off, so I don't need to worry about that. I do wanna point out because I think I didn't mention it, when I was talking to you about the right stick, the left stick, and how to fly, I was referring to flying in mode two. That's the most popular mode outside of Asia. So, if you were to look right here, remote controller mode right there in the middle of the screen. It says mode two. If you're like Dirk said the right stick does this, but mine doesn't, check to see if you're in a different mode. That could be why. By default, though, you should be fine. It's usually set to that. So, I'm gonna click X, and there I am. So, let's move this. Alright. So, what you guys are seeing on my screen is I do have yellow, not the green, because I don't have any GPS signal. How do I know? Because right at the top on this bar, I have no GPS. So, if I take off, it's not gonna hold in place. It won't hold in place as well. It could still use some of the sensors down here to kind of keep track of the ground if it can see, if it can tell, but the downward sensors could help me out with that. But I just wanted to point that out. Since we're talking about photo, though, I'm gonna switch to photo mode. It's not in photo mode. How do I know? Because I have a record button. So, I'm gonna switch over. Right above that is a little switch, and there it goes into photo mode. So, we've talked about all the settings on the top. We've talked about these and we've talked about the settings over there and we've talked about the settings down there. There's a few more settings now that go a little deeper that I'm gonna talk about, and the way that I'm gonna get to that is by clicking right here. So, when I pop that up, I get access to my camera settings. And you guys see right there it says auto. That's gonna figure it out for me just like on your guys' DSLR cameras, right? If I switch over to the next one over, I can now have control of my aperture. So, it's like aperture priority on your DSLR cameras, so that's pretty cool. This drone has an adjustable aperture. The Mavic 2 Pro has an adjustable aperture. The drones that I talked about before I got to those two do not, so you won't see that option. The next setting over, I can now adjust the shutter. So, it's like a shutter priority. So, very familiar if you're comfortable shooting with your DSLRs, right? And then the mode that I will often shoot in is the manual, and this is where I can dial in exactly the setting that I want. So, I'll come back to that in a moment. Let me skip over to the top option up there. Since we're taking photos, let's turn to that first photo mode. This is where I can take a single photo. Next is the burst. Really handy, especially if you're shooting something with some action. You just have to focus on when you're hitting the shutter. Let the camera do the rest. If you guys have a fast card, again, a fast card is really important. I didn't mention where that's found, but right here is your SD card. Right in here. You wanna get a fast card especially if you're shooting 4K stuff. I learned the hard way. I forgot to put in a fast card. I took my Mavic Air out testing the 4K, and all my footage was skippy because they couldn't record to the card fast enough. So, get a fast card. Alright, so there's burst mode. Auto exposure bracketing is AEB. Pretty cool feature, right? You can take three, you can take five. I generally have mine set to five when I wanna capture detail in the highlights and then detail in the shadows, and then I'll merge those two. I'll actually show you guys how to do that later, and we'll show an example of me doing that in the field. But just so you know how'd I get to that setting when I talk about it in the video is right here, AEB. And that's really because, as you guys know, when you shoot something, the sky can often be blown out if you're trying to expose for the foreground, right? So, this is a great feature. It automatically will take a dark, a darker image, a lighter image, and then one at your setting if you're on the three, and then you can pick and choose to merge the two if you want. So, super helpful. And then we have the interval, and this is basically like if you wanted to do some type of time lapse, right? You can have it take a picture every five seconds, every seven, right? So, really handy if you're into doing that. Pretty cool feature. Next is our image ratio. I have mine set to 3:2. You could change it to 4:3. Did you see how it just got a little tighter, a little more cropped? I believe the Mavic 1, the Mavic Air you're gonna have to do a 4:3. The sensor just doesn't support the 3:2, but you wanna look in here. I did you'll see 'cause I have a few photos in here that I'm gonna show you guys in Lightroom, but I was exploring 16:9 for a while. Someone told me and I was like, oh, I should check it out. And I didn't realize, I'm like, oh, I'm cropping the photo. If I want a 16 by nine, I will just do that in post. So, I have some photos that are a little skinny. You'll see them, but I've since fixed that. Alright, next, image format. Really important. Are you shooting jpeg? Are you shooting RAW? Do you wanna shoot both? The advantages are RAW, you can obviously have all the latitude when you're adjusting in the highlights and the shadows, but you get a bigger file. If you're trying to do burst, you're gonna have to wait for the buffering, right? The jpeg, though, if you're like, ah, I don't really care, I just edit on my phone, it's not a big deal, that might be a good option for you. If you're really unsure, you could just do both and always have your RAW stored away for when you feel a little bit more comfortable, more professional. I definitely leave mine on RAW though, personally, and then I always like to set my white balance. So, the white balance by default will probably be on auto. And just like with your guys' DSLRs when you shoot, you should set it. So, what is it? If you step outside right now, it's probably cloudy. We're in Seattle. I'm not used to that, right? I'm used to that next one right there. But I would set it to cloudy, and that way when I go into post I can copy, past, edit, and they will all look very similar. You get into a bit of a headache when you're shooting in auto because the color temperature changes depending on which way the camera's facing with the light. And even if you're on a weird setting like incandescent, you can at least fix that in post, right? You could fix all your photos in post. And you also have a custom option there. Style. If I am shooting RAW, then this doesn't necessarily matter. Just to let you know. But you do have some settings in here if you wanna play with your sharpness, your contrast, and your saturation. I shoot with RAW so I don't worry about that too much. And then the color profile, if you're shooting RAW, again, this doesn't matter, but I have the d-cinelike 'cause that's the setting I used for my video. Just letting you guys know that. And then if I go over to my settings, I have a whole bunch of options here which are really helpful. I love to have... Let's get off the blue, it's gonna bother me, and let's bring my exposure down real quick. I can adjust my exposure with this dial right here, and just to make sure we're on the same page, this adjusts my gimbal. So, I don't think I pointed that out. So, you can see my gimbal's moving. So, these two dials are really handy, really important. You don't have the gimbal on the Mavic Air and the Spark, or sorry, the Exposure on those, but you do have the gimbal control. And the Mavic Pro, the Mavic 2, has both of these same ones, so very similar. Go back. Okay, let me go back into these settings. I like to have my histogram on, and you can move this anywhere you want. So, really handy. I'm just clicking and dragging and then you can exit out of it. It gives me a nice visual for I'm too overexposes currently. This is especially helpful when you guys are outside because it's gonna be hard to see your screen unless you have a screen that is really bright like the built-in screen that I have here. I leave on the auto-focus continuous because that will constantly try to set the focus at the center of the frame every so often. So, sometimes, why is that important? Because you can touch to focus, and sometimes I forget to touch the focus and I get a shot and it's kinda out of focus. I have an aperture on here, so it's something that I especially have to be mindful of. You also have the... I'm just going through the important ones. There's a lot of features. We could spend all day in here. I have a 25-minute video on this whole thing, right? I'd rather just speak in a little bit more detail to the ones I use. We have the overexposure warning, and this is really handy because where I have zebra, I'm blown out. I've lost information. So, you wanna be mindful of that, right? So, I might use the histogram and I might use the zebras to figure out what is my exposure level. I'll get this down. My shutters in the seconds (chuckles). I generally don't shoot photos with a slow shutter because my action will be blurred, unless that's the effect I want. So, it's very important. When we talk about video settings, I'm gonna use a slower shutter. I'll tell you why later, but when I use photos, I wanna use a fast shutter because I wanna capture that action in motion unless I'm shooting waves or I'm trying to do a long exposure or something like that. Okay, let me go back to the settings. My overexposure warning is still on, but I don't have any zebras, so it looks like I'm pretty good. My mechanical shutter is letting me adjust my aperture. I do like to have my grid on. By default, I believe it's off. This helps me when I'm trying to frame up things on the bottom, if I'm trying to get the sunset on the bottom horizon or on the top or if I'm trying to get my subject in one of the rule of third intersection points. And I generally do the diagonals 'cause I wanna see where center is. Center point, I believe it's off by default. So, I just pick one of these and it's kinda like my target so I can focus in on my subject. You definitely wanna have this on when you guys are doing your orbits, right? 'Cause you're gonna need to track that person. And when I'm doing that orbit shot, I'm just zeroing in right there on that little center icon. I'm just trying to keep that person there the whole time. That's the key for that. You can change the color of it as you see down there. And then I have my peak focus threshold, which I actually talked about in the video you're gonna see in a moment. So, you'll see that in action. I'm gonna exit out of this. You guys can see that I have quick access to the settings that I just set right there. So, if you're like oh, what's my white balance, right? Oh, you set it to cloudy. Good, you don't have to go dig into that menu every time. Really really handy to keep an eye up on here like what's going on. This lets me know my focus, so if I click on that, I've now changed to my exposure metering. If I click back to it, I can't tap, and just like a smartphone, you can set focus. So, it's a way to bounce back and forth between the two. Auto focus continuous, I do leave that on when I'm shooting photos because I constantly want the center of my frame to be the focus, generally speaking. I'm not taking my drone, and there's not a lot of times where I'm focusing on a flower. There may be a time when you have subject close, but generally, it's a little bit of a wider scene. But I do switch to MF when I'm doing video, and that is so my focus isn't constantly moving when I'm recording. I lock it. So, that's one way to lock it. I click that, it goes to MF, and then if you have an adjustable, a camera with an adjustment aperture, you can now play with this style and you can change your focus. So, what do I usually do? If you're wondering what happened, if you swipe up, you can go full screen and just focus on your picture. You can swipe up and bring your settings back, just if you were like what's that screen? So, what I usually do is I'll go to auto focus, and you see how my... You see that green box is right there in the center? Isn't new. Right there in the center, great. Green box with my focus, auto focus continues. It'll constantly try to make sure it's center-focused. If that's good, when I'm in video mode, I will switch to the MF and lock it and then not touch it. Just a way to kind of be safe. I'm gonna go up into the settings, which is right up here. So, this thing can get deep fast. There's a lot of stuff in here. You should definitely check out all the settings, but I'm on the aircraft. Enable multiple flight modes, that's how you can be in your intelligent flight modes. There's your maximum altitude. That's in meters right there. My forward sensors, my controller, and this is what I wanted to show you. So, I encourage you guys to set these two buttons on your remote controller. They're also on the Mavics, and you can have quick access to something. So, right now C1 is camera forward down. My C1's right here and it quickly goes down. Really handy. Why is that handy? 'Cause I may fly out, I'm like, oh, there's a boat. I'm gonna go get it. Fly out sport mode, right? And then I wanna get a top down. I don't wanna go like this, like one, two, three. It's out of the frame, right? So, I just whip it really quick and it sets. And then two, my C2, you have various settings here. I usually have mine set to center metering, but sometimes depending on if you're going back and forth... Woops. Going back and forth between settings and you want quick access, you can pick something else like camera settings. Just pick the setting that you use the most. So, there's all my settings right there. Just a quick button. So, I encourage you to play with that, get it set to your preference. Alright, let's go back to our camera settings. So, I'm not gonna spent a ton of time with this, but just to make sure we're on the same page, just like on a big camera, your DSLR, ISO is how sensitive is the sensor to light. So, I generally try to keep this as low as possible. I'll start there at 100, as low as possible. We're in a pretty dark space right now, so I may have to adjust that. Then next I wanna play with my shutter. If I wanna capture something so it's sharp and crisp, not blurred because it's moving, I'm gonna take my shutter up to something like or maybe even 1,000 to make extra sure that my object's gonna be sharp. From there, now I can decide do I wanna adjust my aperture or my ISO. If you don't have a drone with aperture, you're gonna have to obviously adjust your ISO. I do have that luxury, and you can see that even at... So, I'm closed down, it's completely black. Black. If I open all the way up, you can barely see anything. So, at this point, I'm gonna have to make a decision. Do I wanna lower my shutter to maybe and then I'll bring up my ISO. And I'm just clicking and dragging on these settings. I try not to go past 800. There will be times when you may need to, but I just try not to have noise, if possible. So, find a balance what works for you. This is always gonna depend on what the lighting situation is like where you're shooting. Alright. The last thing I wanna kinda point your eye to on this menu is looking down here at the eV value, my exposure value. This can be a nice, helpful tool to help you understand are you overexposed, underexposed. We have the histogram, we have the zebra, right? I can look down there, and if I crank my shutter speed down a little bit... I'm kind of looking until that says zero, and that's the computer saying hey, I think this is a good exposure value. I look at my histogram to kinda verify, and I'm like the histogram is nice and even. I'm pretty good. If my histogram is way too much on one side, like let's exaggerate that, like it's way to the right, it's like this is blown out. Same thing with being way to the left. It's really dark. It's on the left hand side. So, I try to look at that histogram, I look at the eV value, and I make my decisions there. I'm always looking at those. I'm not just trusting my screen because it's gonna be bright outside, right? So, I'm also looking at those to verify what my settings are. Alright. I think what we're gonna do now is we're gonna check out me doing a shot out in the field in Washington. At that location, it was sunset, my friend was in her kayak, and we took the drone up real quick. I'll re-walk you through some of the settings in the video. You'll see it in action. Pay particular attention to that peak focus threshold. That's really helpful for finding your focus, and I'll play the video. So, now we're down by the river. I have my friend out there in a kayak, and I'm gonna show you guys how I would capture this scene with my drone. We'll take a still photo. I'll run you through some of my favorite photo settings. So, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna try to find a shot that is interesting, and I'll line up my drone first. And there is my subject. So, this is fantastic because now you guys have a sense of scale because you see a kayaker, you understand the scale of a human, and you can start to see that this is a pretty vast, wide scene. So, I'm now gonna run through some of my settings and just try to get this shot dialed in. I'm gonna come over here to my photo settings, and right now I'm on auto. So, I'm gonna try to do this manually. I like to keep my ISO as low as possible. So, I'm gonna move my ISO slider maybe try 200. I'm gonna put my aperture right now at 5.6, and I get to do that with the Phantom because the Phantom does have control over the aperture. If you have a Mavic Pro, Mavic Air, a Spark, then you won't have this exact setting, but that's okay. You can still work with the ISO and the shutter speed. Because I have a subject that is moving since the water is flowing a little bit, I wanna keep my shutter a little higher. So, I'm gonna maybe try 240, and because it's still a little dark, I'm going to move my aperture maybe down to 4. and open it up a little bit, which I'm still in the sweet spot range. Alright, so I'll try to work with that for now. Let me try to frame this up a little bit better. I'm looking at that tree that you see there on the left hand side 'cause it's right in front of the sun and it gives me a sense of balance. As you can see on the right hand side, it's pretty open and empty, and that tree on the left hand side makes this scene feel a little more balanced, and it's close to the rule of thirds line there. So, I feel like this makes for a pretty good framing. I wanna make sure my image ratio is giving me the widest photo possible. If I'm on 4:3, it crops in a little bit. If I'm on 16:9, it crops in even more. So, I'm gonna stick to the 3:2 for the Phantom. If you have a Mavic Air, a Mavic Pro, then you should stick with a 4:3. If you wanna do any cinematic 16:9 cropping or something like that, do it in post and Photoshop or something like that. I'm also gonna confirm I'm in RAW because I wanna edit this in Lightroom after, bring maybe some more detail out of the shadows and then maybe pull some more detail out of the highlights. And then white balance is set to auto. I definitely wanna see that to something more solid so that my colors aren't shifting back and forth. So, I'm gonna just choose sunny for this scene. And now I'm gonna go voer to my gear setting and I'm gonna turn up the histogram, and I can move this histogram, which is pretty cool, and I can start to see how are the exposure levels for my shadows, my mid tones, and my highlights. And the key for this histogram is to basically have a nice, even graph. If everything's too much to the left, too dark, too much to the right, too bright. So, this looks pretty good. I'm next gonna go over to my grid and just make sure that I have my grid lines on, and I'm gonna go to my center point and set it to a standard so it's kinda like a target. And then I'm gonna go over to this peak focus threshold. I'm gonna set this to high, and what that does is you now see that there's red lines in my shot. I'll exaggerate this by going to low, and basically, that gives me a visual for what's in focus. This is really handy, especially on bright days. So, I can leave it on high. These red lines will not show up in the photo, so don't worry about that. It's just for monitoring. Alright, and now we're looking pretty good. So, I'm gonna tap on my subject, and this focus is working just like on your cell phone. If you have a smart phone like an iPhone, a newer Android, when you tap, it focuses there. Okay, so I'm gonna maybe pull back a little bit, maybe get a little more altitude, point down a little bit, and I'm putting that tree line right on that top rule of thirds line. And I'm gonna take a picture and see what this looks like. I'm gonna hit the play button and review it. Alright, looks okay. I'm now gonna try something just to make sure I'm really good. I'm gonna go to my camera settings and I'm gonna switch from single photo to this AEB, and this is the auto exposure bracketing. And what this will do is whatever I have it set to, it's gonna take a lighter photo and a darker photo and it's gonna take a photo at the settings that I have, and then I can merge it later in a post editing app like Photoshop or something, Lightroom. You can choose three or five. I'm gonna choose five. It's a little, maybe, overkill, but I will then just choose the two photos I wanna merge. So, I'm gonna select that, and now I'm gonna take a photo. And that just took five RAW images, so you gotta give it a second to record to the card, and I can review these and just make sure they're good. And now I have a lot more information in the sky on this particular image. So, yeah, this is looking pretty good.