Hey guys, and welcome to the special section on lighting and direction now button bit strange to do a special separate section on lighting and direction but it is really really important drones now, lighting is, of course very important with general photography as well. So in general photography you can control a lot, a lot more especially if you're a professional photographer, you might have a professional studio where you've got your own special lights and you can set them to exactly the you know, light level that you want. The never going to change as long as you leave them and don't touch them. You can even grab your subject and tell them to face a certain direction so that they get the perfect light and all that sort of stuff. You can diffuse the light in certain ways with different filters and things like that you have a lot of control over the light with drones enforced We don't have much control at all, our light sources the sun, it's going to be nice and bright, which is good for the drones and means that you don't end up with noisy images or anything like that you can have a very low ISO setting for those who know what ISO is, it's basically the sensitivity of the camera itself, you can have it set to very low, because the light is usually so bright, during the middle of the day shooting video, it's very easy in that regard.

But at the same time, you don't have control over the sun, you know, a cloud can go past it and change things by a couple of stops, you know, in the blink of an eye, you don't have any control over that. And you don't have any control over reducing the brightness of the sun, either. You know, perhaps you're trying to take a video or a photo of something but it's just too bright or it's not bright enough or whatever it might date. So you have to kind of deal with it in unique and special ways. When you're taking photos and videos with drones. It's different to take photos and videos with digital SLR or point shoot cameras or even before.

So that's what this section is about and why it's so special to begin with. The main issue with drones and taking videos and photos is shooting directly into the sun. So just as an example, imagine that you are the sons, you're my light source and I've got a drone here and the sun's over there where you are. Now, the last thing I want to do is shooting directly into the actual sun itself, because that will just overflow the shark. The Sharks will get overexposure or maybe under exposure depending on exactly where it's looking at or one photograph, but in January just won't be a particularly good shot. The one exception is if you're taking a photo of the sun itself maybe during sunrise or sunset further and you can do that with these drones look fantastic.

You need slightly special settings for that can be done for the most that you want to be taken away from the sun's, you want to still be using it as your light source, but you want to be taking videos and photos of things facing away from the sun. Now you can take photos and videos slightly off center or have access to the sun. But in my experience, you run the very high risk that you get basically flaring over the lemons. So I'll show you here now this is what it looks like when you take a photo video and you get this kind of flaring coming over the actual lens itself and it kind of just ruins the whole video, you might have had a fantastic shot like this one here in Iceland, where we were taking video and fantastic shot. I thought when I got home I didn't really look too good.

And that's the other thing. If you try and take photos at that slightly off axes, you may not notice it because at the time you're flying around you Looking at your phone or maybe your tablet or whatever it is, and you just want to be able to see it's such a small screen so brought outside it's very difficult to see and Pac Man in the galaxy are concentrating on flying the actual drone. But you just want even if you're looking, you just won't be able to see that slight lens flare over until you get it back on to a bigger screen, you know, sort of darker room where you can actually see it properly. And that's when you'll notice that it's all been flared and ruin your shot. So my suggestion of what I generally do is, again, if the sun's facing this way, you're the source.

Try and take videos and photos in a 180 degree arc or only facing away from the sun's anywhere from here. All the way to here should be safe. You shouldn't get that flow or anything you should still be able to get great fantastic shots in a well lit by the sun, but at the same time you don't have that overblown or underexposed photos or flavor reading that garbage that you want to keep out of your shots. So, in that hundred and 80 degree arc, looking in any of that direction is where I try and always shoot. And where I would suggest, at least to begin with that you always shoot, it's a good way of just kind of eliminating all the difficult pneus of dealing with the sunlight. And you know what I say to say that you can keep everything on automatic and still get great shots just by pointing in that direction away from the sun.

So that's the first sort of tip. The second one is to try and take photos and videos at the golden hour now, this is what was named by photographers. It's essentially the hour before sunset or after sunrise so Sun rises at 7am in the morning. Take videos and photos between 7am and 8am dialogue fantastic, same night time into Sunset at 6pm. Take videos and photos between 5pm and 6pm In that golden hour is just fantastic. What happens is because the sun is lower on horizon, it's got to go through more air more sort of atmosphere, which diffuses all the light, turns it a different color as well, gold as you would guess.

And just gives everything a beautiful sort of warm feeling. Everything looks, the light isn't as harsh here, when it's over the top does not have much atmosphere and it comes beating down. That's why it's hotter during the day during the night. But you know, there's harsh environments, it's a lot harder to get the right sort of light and look through shot. But when it's you know, setting or rising or anything like that you've got this beautiful golden light that's very light and you know, not as harsh So, that's a general rule to also follow that will guarantee you get really, really good shot. The other tip that I have is this website here.

So if you go to the website via this link, you'll notice that it's got a lot of different information on the throat. So first enter in the location that you want to actually video or photo, I mean, this might be the park down the road, or it could be a park or something further off maybe the location of your holiday or something like that, wherever it is, enter it in, and then enter the day that you will actually be there. So again, this might be today or it might be a year in the future doesn't matter, enter in those two pieces of information. And it will calculate this map for you. So this is an example this is just in Paris, France. say we wanted to take a photo and beautiful video of this lake here.

But we don't know when the sunrise or sunset will be. Well, this map tells us So say we wanted to drive to here and then take photos this way during the afternoon during sunset, What we won't know, unless we work on this is that the sun is setting over here. So the sun will be here and we'll be shining light in this direction over here. So the better thing to do is to actually go over here, take off or maybe talk there and fly a drone over this direction, and shoot in this direction. So shoot with a drone facing anywhere from here, all the way around here. So you're looking in this direction with the sun setting to your back.

And when you do that, you're as I said, you have nice golden light streaming over the lake. It will give you a beautiful, beautiful look. If you want to do this during sunrise. You pay attention to this one here because you got sunrise with that color, sunset with that color. So if you wanted to do this during the sunrise, you'd probably want to fly a drone over here. So you've got the sun rising from here, beaming light over this way.

You're filming in any of this area sort of over here with all the sun facing that way. So that's a sort of quick, easy shortcut that you can log in quickly, putting your location scene where the sunrise and sunset is going to be no sort of help to kind of form your shot. You can also worry about things like Google Earth as well getting even better 3d representation where you're going to be flying. I mean, if you're just going out to the park for five minutes to have fun, fair enough, go nuts. But if you're planning on taking, you know your drone over to some special location, perhaps it's a park or a holiday destination or something like that. These tools are excellent to just kind of bring them up on the map and to sort of see what the best shot is, you know, you can essentially fly around on Google Earth as you would with a drone.

So that combined with this online tool really helps you understand where your mind is. and control it in that sense, you obviously can't control the sun, but you can at least make sure you're in the right place at the right time to get the exact effect that you want. So that's the section on light and direction. As I said, it's a bit different having a whole section on it, but I thought it was very important for drones in particular, because we can't control those things. You know, you can control how you balance a photo and whether it's symmetrical or things like that. That's easy to do, but you can't control the zone.

So that's ways of managing those situations and I find alien get some fantastic results. So next up, we'll go into all the different advanced flying shots you can do. I'll talk to you