Shooting aerial photographs in the winter

Image taken in freezing temperature.

Photographing aerial property shots during the winter months can be quite a challenge.

Poor weather means that there are fewer opportunities to get airborne and low temperatures affect the performance of the drone batteries meaning that flights are shortened. And problems don’t stop there! Once in the air taking decent photographs can be quite a challenge. A low sun means there is a lot less light available, there are long deep shadows even during the middle of the day and often you are shooting straight into the sun. If you’re not careful this can lead to underexposed images and grainy results as the camera sensor tries to handle the deep shadows and direct low light.

Using the Expose to the Right (ETTR) technique

To compensate for these conditions we use a technique called ‘expose to the right’. What does that mean? In digital photography, exposing to the right (ETTR) is the technique of adjusting the exposure of an image to as bright as possible at the lowest ISO possible (without causing unwanted over-exposure) to collect the maximum amount of light and thus get the optimum performance out of the digital image sensor. The ‘right’ refers to the way that the light is displayed on the exposure histogram – more on the left would lead to a dark image, more on the right a lighter image. The trick is to get as much of the exposure on the right of the histogram display without over-exposing the image and so loosing valuable image information. It’s actually safer to under expose an image as you can always brighten it in post production. An over exposed image however is harder to ‘bring back’ as once the pixels have become solid white there is no information to be retrieved.

Auto exposure bracketed

The winter months is also where AEB (Auto exposure bracketed) settings come into their own. The drone camera can be set to take a series of either 3 or 5 images, one after the other, at different exposures. Once back in the studio the shots can be taken into Adobe Lightroom and merged into one HDR (High dynamic range) image that is exposed correctly for both the deep shadows and the strong, bright highlights.

Catalyst Video Services offer a professional and fully qualified HD drone photography service alongside years of experience using Adobe professional image editing software to provide stunning aerial images that will make your project stand out from the crowd.