I'm still a newbie at this aerial photography thing and I know that shadows are probably inevitable given the position of the sun, but what could I do, besides post production, in my settings to enhance this photo? I'm really struggling to understand the whole ISO, shutter speed, and white balance settings. I know I should probably be experimenting with different settings while the P3S is in the air, but it's not always easy to see the settings on an iPhone. I'm considering an iPad, but could use some help until then. Suggestions???

The higher the ISO the more light will come into the camera sensor, So in very light conditions go down to iso 100... In darker conditions go up in ISO which will make things look brighter, Shutter speed is what it says if you want to catch something thats moving the faster the shutter speed it will freeze your subject, White balance will best be left in auto you could do that in your choice of software,,, IE photoshop, CC,  !!! hope this helps.

You can't do a lot with that shot.
It's always going to have the problems of dark foreground, bright sky and brighter sun.
There's too much contrast between bright and dark.
Try turning your camera around and shooting with the sun instead of looking into it, to get a more uniform brightness across your frame.

The first thing you could do is not shoot into the sun. It is a pretty simple camera, but like all cameras, the automatic mode will expose for the brightest thing in the frame, and that's the sun.

The brightness of the sun tricks the camera into under-exposing everything else. So you need to take control manually and set EV (exposure compensation) to a positive value, at least +0.7 and perhaps much higher - trial and error, or exposure bracketing, will help here. This will over-expose the sun even more, and also some of the sky, but give better exposure of the ground.

If you shoot in RAW and have the right software you can make more adjustments than with jpg, but even the shot that you posted in jpg can be improved with a few seconds work in photoshop

I used the app "Snapseed" and corrected some of the picture.

Thanks all. I realize that this should have been a morning shot where I could have been using the sun, but it just looked good to the naked eye and thought I'd see what I could do.

ISO is the sensitivity of the sensor.  The higher the ISO the more the sensor will amplify the incoming light on the collectors.  The drawback to ISO is that if it is too high you get noise.  In bright day light the ISO needs to be low unless you have ND filters.   DJI just did something interesting with the P4P camera and that is they locked the ISO at 500.  Why is that?  Because 500 is probably the native ISO for that 1" sensor.  What this means is, this is the point where the sensor will have the most dynamic range (DR).  DR is how is the range of light the camera can resolve without losing details.  Cameras with high DR will have the ability to bring out details in things like shadows while exposing for a shot such as this one.  Next is shutter speed.  Shutter speed is how long the sensor stays open.  The higher your shutter, the less light you sensor sees and longer your shutter the more light it sees.  These are two elements in your exposure.  They tie into a concept called stepping up or down the light by what is known as a "stop."  In photography if you increase your exposure by one stop you are doubling the amount of light being resolved.  If you close down a stop you are cutting the incoming light in half.  Now, how do you know what a stop is.  If you double your ISO you are increasing a stop.  If you double your shutter speed you are decreasing a stop.  If your ISO is 100 and your shutter is at 1/25th lets say.  If you increase your ISO to 200 you have doubled the light if you do nothing to your shutter.   If you were to double your shutter to 1/50th you would go back down a stop and your exposure would be the same as it was before.  Each ISO stop would be in this interval 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600.  For shutter speed 1/25, 1/50, 1/100, 1/200, 1/400, 1/800, 1/1600, 1/3200, etc.   Now of course you can close down or open up smaller intervals like you can set the ISO to 600 which would be a 1/2 stop after 400.  

One last item.  Unless you have a Phantom 4 Pro/Adv Inspire X5/X5R/X5S/X4S.  You don't have another parameter called aperture or the Iris.  These mentioned systems have those where you can close or open a stop by making the aperture larger or smaller.  With things like a P3 and P4 you have a fixed iris at f/2.8, which is fairly open.  With these cameras you may want to invest in ND filters, which there is a whole explanation on in this forum.  

I might be doing this wrong but I thought the simplest solution is to just tap the bottom dark area on the screen ............. a circle appears there and the exposure is calculated from that point rather than an average over the whole picture.

GeoffN...could you explain that a bit further? Are you doing that through the GO app before you even take the picture so that the camera auto focuses on that dark area, or how are you doing it?

Hi Ice Viper

you could also do a HDR photo, in the setting you can tell the camera to take 3 or 5 photos.  It will take them at varying light settings for you.  I then use Adobe Light room and you merge all the shots together.

cheers

Adrian

Interesting concept AidoH. I'll have to give that a try as well...thanks.

Ice Viper Posted at 2017-4-24 08:50
GeoffN...could you explain that a bit further? Are you doing that through the GO app before you even take the picture so that the camera auto focuses on that dark area, or how are you doing it?

You just tap the screen on the dark area at the bottom using your tablet (on the dji app)  before you take the picture. I usually do it before I take off. A small circle appears where you tap and that is where the exposure is calculated from. If you tap the small cross at the top right of the circle, exposure will go back to being an average over the whole picture.  If you tap somewhere else on the screen, the circle moves to wherever you tap.