Tornado12
 lvl.4
Flight distance : 356391 ft
United States
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I spent several years as a nature and wildlife photographer, before ever touching drones. I also ran a photography community website for a few years where we posted in forums like this, and shared our photographs for fellow photographers to critique. I also shot a lot of Airshows, which is a whole different type of photography from landscape and wildlife. I am now getting more into drones and videography. I can say that my experience as a landscape and wildlife still photographer has come in incredibly handy getting into drones. You utilize much of the same tools and parameters, and even video editing in Premier Pro isn't overly different from editing photos in photoshop I am learning. With that said I wanted to share my thoughts on this discussion.
The most important thing to remember in this discussion is that Photography and Videography are DIFFERENT. While ISO, Shutter, Aperture are still your major tools, they are used a little differently in photo's and videos. In Landscape photography for example, I rarely ever shot any photo's under F/11 Aperture. F/16 was a typical sweet spot. This is because Aperture affects depth of field, which is often really important in landscape compositions. ISO is merely the sensors sensitivity to light. As you crank the ISO up, the sensor becomes more and more sensitive to light. As this sensitivity increases however, you get more and more noise, as we all know. I did shoot just 2 or 3 weddings in my years, for family. I never liked doing weddings - I hated it in fact, and done it just because it was family. In portraiture photography, you tend to shoot much lower apertures, like F/2.0 or so, faster shutter speeds, etc. Again, aperture tends to be so much more important in photography than in videography, because of the depth of field element.
When shooting video from a drone, the Aperture is largely just used as another tool to control for exposure. Unlike what some say here, I do not prioritize ISO so hard. While you do typically want to keep ISO as low as possible to avoid noise, I much prefer to ensure proper motion blur by controlling the shutter speed for example. ISO 400 or even 800 will not kill your video. As a matter of fact, these are your only two options when shooting DLOG in mavic 3. This is one thing I hope DJI changes. For nighttime video even going up to ISO 1600 is ok. A little noise is easy to fix in post. If you do not get proper motion blur though, there is no way to fix this. I think getting proper motion blur is much more critical. It bright sunlight, if you ignore shutter speed, it can climb into the hundreds. A shutter speed that is high can make video appear to not be smooth, and even jerky to the human eye. To me this is the FIRST Rule of drone videography is to focus first on getting smooth video captures. This means you must control the shutter speed. If you are flying 4K 30, then you use a shutter of 60. If you are flying 4K 60 then you use a shutter of 120. This essentially means the shutter opens and closes twice for every frame of video. This is what gives video a natural motion blur, which makes motion appear smooth to the human eye. This is completely opposite of what you would do in normal still photography. From a pure photography standpoint when you think of subjects in motion you immediately think high shutter speeds, which is natural, slow shutters on moving objects in photography means blurry photo's. When I did airshow photography, I was often shooting at 600, 800, or even 1000 shutter speed. I shot shutter priority in these events. When a fighter jet is zipping by at over 500mph and doing stunts, you need that incredibly fast shutter speed and you are often bursting photo's. Its all about speed here. In videography however, you are not using shutter speed to freeze motion though, in fact you sort of want to do the opposite. I have seen many photographers who know nothing about drones make this mistake - they automatically think "Flying, lots of motion, need fast shutter to keep everything sharp". This is not the case in videography. I say all that to say that I would prioritize shutter speed over ISO in most all situations when flying a drone. I would even prioritize it over aperture.
So what about aperture in videography? We know what shutter to use, and I have suggested that ISO isnt overly important so long as you keep an eye on it, and try to keep it as low as possible, without prioritizing it. For aperture, I try to keep it around or close to F/4 in the mavic 3. I want to run tests on this myself soon, but the word on the street is that the camera lens on the mavic 3 is sharpest at F/4. This is one thing about lenses that you can learn as you get more and more into the rabbit hole of photography. Different lenses tend to perform at their best when at specific apertures. Now granted, often the variances here are not big, but it is a thing that lenses tend to have preferred aperture for their peak performance. For the mavic 3 this is reported to be f/4. If you are asking "well what about your depth of field argument above?" Depth of field is really only important if you trying to capture objects in your immediate foreground, out toward infinity, with a vast background. If you are just flying a city scape for example, where all your subjects are just out in the "background" then aperture changes will have no real noticeable effect on your depth of field. The further the physical distance from your subjects to the camera lens, the less the aperture affects depth of field. Where aperture could be important is on a shot where say you wanted to pan sideways from some type of cover like a row of shrubs that are really close, and then have that open up into a vast landscape. As you hit that transition, if you are flying super close to these shrubs, and are at F/2.8, you will likely see the background / foreground be blurry as the transition occurs. Depending on the effect you are going for you can adjust things here - but consider the physical location of your drone as one of the things yo ucan adjust as well. Just changing the physical distance from the shrubs in this example will have some results on the outcome.
I'm rambling at this point so I should stop. The main thing to understand in both photography and videography is having an intimate understanding at exactly what ISO, Aperture size, and Shutter speed actually are, what they do, and how they play with each other. Once you have an intimate understanding of how these function, you will know exactly what to do in any circumstance to get the shot you want. Every shot is different. |
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