Hi all,

Just learning the basics with my new Mavic Air. One of the first things that stands out from my first footage of course is a blown out sky. I hope to get some good ND filters soon to be able to get better results as well as lower the shutter speed.
As of now, there still is not much selection regarding the filters. It occurs to me that for some very bright situations I will probably need up to an ND32 filter. I found one attractive set of 4 that has the ND4/PL, ND8/PL, ND16/PL, ND32/PL Filters. You'll notice that they are all PL though - and so I'd like to ask anyone with lots of experience with filters.


Some of what I plan to shoot will include some lakes and oceans with bright reflections, so I definitely think I will need some PL filters. But for other things I will shoot, perhaps little to no other reflections - so is there any disadvantage to using the PL filters in such situations?


The Mavic Pro has a wide range of filters to choose from, some quite reasonably priced, since it's been around a lot more. I can wait some, but I hope someone can give me some answers first.


Thanks for any good info.

You will still get blown out sky if you are exposing for a much darker ground. There is nothing you can do about that due to the limited dynamic range of the camera. What an ND filter will do is to allow you to maintain the 180 shutter rule when shooting video. Last weekend I had to use an ND64 (bright day, snow on ground) to get my shutter speed correct but the dynamic range is still a limiting factor, either the ground will be too dark or the sky will be too bright.

As above, the only way to solve the issue of bright sky in this case is to use a graduated ND, which is not very practical on a drone. Works wonders for DSLR/mirrorless cameras, but you need to be able to adjust their orientation which is not really possible on drone. Looks like PolarPro do some for the more pro drones but you'd be fixed in your composition pretty much as the grad is not moveable so you'd have to compose to get the graduation in the right place on the image.

Thanks for the info.
I know it is not ever going to be perfect. Although actually the first footage I took with the sun behind the drone to my surprise came out pretty good. It's just a question of reducing the glare in the sky a bit but not so much as to make the ground look bad. Also I want to get rid of any jello effect.

There still wasn't anything on my original question though - is there any downside to using the polarized nd filters all the time?

Toraneko Posted at 2018-2-20 02:27
Thanks for the info.
I know it is not ever going to be perfect. Although actually the first footage I took with the sun behind the drone to my surprise came out pretty good. It's just a question of reducing the glare in the sky a bit but not so much as to make the ground look bad. Also I want to get rid of any jello effect.

Oops, my bad.

Using PL filters all the time wont have too many issues, the main one I can think of is that if the polarizer is misaligned then you can get a darker spot in the sky compared to the rest of it. Otherwise, you won't get the full effect if its misaligned but I don't think it will cause other noticeable issues.

This is what can happen, but fairly unlikely (Credit Ken Rockwell)