hey what's up it's Jerad with Ditch Auto and I wanted to talk about shooting in
manual mode with your DJI Matic air now this little drone is is pretty great
considering its size they've managed to pack a really good camera into such a
small little device but just like any other camera it does a lot of work on
its own when you are in automatic mode which is the default and automatic mode
just isn't gonna give you as good of an image as you would get if you took
control over that camera which means putting it in manual mode now I have a
whole course the whole premise of ditch auto is about getting out of automatic
mode in getting into manual mode and I have a course on that in photography
primarily with like a DSLR style camera but a lot of the things that I talked
about in that course are very much the same I'm gonna go over it more
specifically in regards to this drone here but if you want more of an in-depth
discussion on and and kind of instruction on shooting and manual I
recommend checking out the course and then I do have plans on doing like a
full shooting in manual course for drones as well it just isn't available
yet so you'll want to make sure to subscribe to our channel here so you can
get notified and even head on over to ditch Auto comm and sign up for our
notification newsletter so that we can send out a notification when when that
course becomes available but the first thing that you're gonna need to do I
think even before deciding to shoot in manual or getting over in a manual is
actually switching into raw mode you want to shoot RAW photos and so we'll
want to make sure that we're in photo mode we'll go into our settings here
we'll tap on the icon in the middle here and then we'll choose our image format
I typically shoot JPEG plus raw now the reason I do that is because the raw
image is gonna have much more image detail there you're getting a raw image
out of the camera meaning there's no compression nothing's been done to that
image the JPEG image is compressed and it has a little bit of stuff applied to
it just to kind of give it a better look I guess you could say out of the camera
but as far as being able to adjust that image you're not going to be able to do
as much to that Jai big image as a raw image so I recommend
going and switching into raw another thing that you're going to want to do is
go into this setting here and choose manual so immediately it went into some
weird settings here and the screen went pretty much dark I could barely see what
is in front of the screen here so I'm going to need to make some adjustments
immediately and we're going to talk about each of these adjustments the
first thing is the shutter speed now the shutter works a little bit different on
a small tiny drone like this than it does on say a DSLR style camera but the
shutter speed essentially is how fast the shutter opens and closes so when the
shutter opens and closes how long is the sensor exposed to light that technically
is what shutter speed is adjusting and so the slower the shutter speed meaning
the slower the number I met 60 which is one sixtieth of a second that is a
slower shutter speed and if I even go lower like say to fifteen one fifteenth
of a second you can see that the shutter speed is slowed down quite a bit and
what's gonna happen is it's gonna be harder for me to capture sharp images
now this might not be such a big deal when you're shooting video because video
typically has more blur it has blur built into it it's video it's moving but
with photos you want your photos to be tack sharp and so shooting at a slower
shutter speed like this wouldn't work so you're going to want to increase your
shutter speed and I typically when I fly I'm shooting at like one two hundredth
of a second I don't really want to go any any slower than that on my shutter
speed because then I'm gonna get blur in my images because get a keep in mind the
drone is moving its flying and you know your camera isn't locked down on a
tripod like you could do if you are shooting regular photos so you want to
make sure that your shutter speed is somewhere where you're getting you know
enough of the action frozen now you could even play with your shutter speed
a bit and have a your point of interest be nice and sharp but actually because
you're flying having a little bit of that natural blur that you would get
because you're and your camera is moving so that's why
I kind of keep my shutter speed maybe between 200 and 320 because I get some
of that natural blur like for example if I was flying over some trees the trees
wouldn't be super sharp they'd be a little bit blurry but the horizon or
whatever I was focused on in front of the camera would be nice and sharp so
it's kind of a good trade-off there you want to be kind of you know setting that
shutter speed somewhere that's appropriate now if you're outside on a
bright and sunny day you might not be able to adjust that shutter speed nearly
as much as you would like that shutter speed might have to go extremely high
just to compensate for how bright it is outside that's where you might want to
introduce some ND filters so I have these polar Pro ND filters that slide
over the front of the camera and restrict the amount of light that go
into the camera I'm gonna do a video on these at a later time so make sure to
subscribe to our channel here but those give you a little bit more control not
only when shooting photos but also with video because it gives you a lot more
flexibility there the little pack comes with three different intensities and so
with those three different intensities you're able to adjust your shutter speed
much more because you're able to block some of the light that goes in on a
little drone like this you are not getting the ability to adjust the
aperture the aperture is essentially the iris of your lens that opens and closes
so I'm sure you've seen this on some cameras on little tiny sensors like
these that you have in your smartphone and in little drones like this there's
no aperture adjustment so you can't adjust the aperture like you can on some
of the bigger drones like the Phantom 4 Pro or they inspire to those drones you
can adjust the aperture and have a little bit more flexibility there now we
also have the ISO or ISO and that increases the sensitivity of the sensor
the sensitivity of the sensor is a nice adjustment to have there with the ISO
but with this little tiny camera if you increase it too much your image starts
to get fuzzy or noisy camera noise or sensor noise is the term that's given to
it and what that means is the sensor sensitivity has turned up so
much that it's losing some of its ability to to really work at its ideal
limit and so even though they give us thirty two hundred as far as that ISO
limit that's way too high for me I never like to go above eight hundred on this
eight hundred isn't very high which means flying in
you know darker situations and trying to film is gonna be rough taking photos is
gonna be rough but that's just the nature of these smaller drones these
smaller packages so let's recap the shutter speed is one of our biggest
adjustments here because we can if we're shooting video slow down the shutter
speed probably all the way down to like one one thirtieth and be fine now if
you're wanting to shoot at a higher frame rate for example sixty frames per
second you're not going to be able to shoot at sixty frames per second when
you're down at one thirtieth you're not even really gonna be able to shoot at 30
frames per second when you're down this low because the shutter speed the frames
per second has to be double what your shutter speed is so if your shutter
speed is say we've got it at sixty right here this would be ideal for shooting
thirty frames per second if we're wanting to shoot sixty frames per second
we need to at least be at 120 if not higher so think about that when you're
deciding to shoot those cool sixty frames per second so that you can go and
edit slow motion you're gonna have to be at a higher shutter speed or a faster
shutter speed then then you would normally so that's a quick kind of
overview of shutter speed and ISO and how those two work together typically
what I will do outside is I will try to get the shutter speed where I want it to
be without going too high especially if I'm shooting video I want a little bit
of natural blur I don't want the shutter speed to be super fast because then
everything's really sharp and it just feels weird it has that cheap drone look
it's not very cinematic so you want to keep your shutter speed lower but if I
need a little bit more light I can bump up that ISO a little bit
but like I said I try not to go too high I definitely don't want to go over 800
and in those instances where it's a bright day out it's too bright and I
can't keep my shutter speed lower like for video like around 120 maybe 200 at
the most or when I'm shooting video and I can't get my shutter speed down below
400 I will throw on an indie filter so I can block some of that light that's
coming on to the sensor and get more of that photo or that cinematic video look
that I'm looking for there are a couple of other things that
you can change these are things that I typically do a just and I'm going to
talk more about these in my other two videos that I'm producing for this drone
so make sure to subscribe to our channel to be notified when those come out but
white balance is something that I adjust because as you fly your drone around
you're flying towards the Sun you're flying away from it partially towards it
and the white balance is changing constantly as you move it around and so
just for consistency's sake I tend to change the white balance a little bit I
also change the style of the image because the drone does add a lot of
effect to the image to kind of make it look good out of camera I want to be
able to have more control of my image myself and then I also will sometimes
make some changes to the actual color profile which is more important for me
when shooting the video than it is with photos if you're shooting raw photos out
of this you still have a lot of room for color correction and all that stuff when
you're shooting video you don't have near the amount of room for adjustment
there so with that said those are the things that I do to use my Mavic err in
manual mode definitely make sure to check out the other two videos which are
the top five settings that I change for shooting photos and the top five
settings that I change for shooting video on your Mavic air so that you can
get the best quality photos and video footage out of your drone thanks so much
for checking out this video make sure to check out the links in the description
below if you were still thinking about picking one of these up want any cool
accessories or whatever we've got some links for you including some links to
our website where we have some additional resources for you so
definitely check that out and don't forget about the ditch
of course which is free if you want to master manual mode get out a shooting
auto it's the course for you and it's free so make sure to check that out take
care and I hope to see you back here soon on ditch Auto