I have been using a drone for over 5 years now to capture unique birds eye views of landscapes and I really enjoy the abstract nature of the results. Recently I have started to produce more traditional landscape drone images, being panoramas of particular vistas. It’s an enjoyable process and delivers pretty good results, and I find the images are more accessible and understandable as well compared to some of the more abstract results you get from using a drone !

Here is how I go about it ….

1. Before I fly

I like to use Google Maps to work out a decent outlook or vista that may translate to a good panorama. It also helps to visualise where you want the drone to be positioned whilst you pan and take photos. Sometimes though its just as good to go to where you are going, wait for the right light, and just get up there and look around.

2. Drone Settings

I have experimented over many sessions with settings to yield better results and I have settle don these - try different ones as you go about your image taking and see what works best where you are and the types of scenes you are capturing.

From the Phantom 4 Pro (P4P) menu,

the Photo Symbol settings :
- Photo set to AEB and 5 shots
- Ratio 4:3
- always RAW format
- White Balance set to custom and any value, as long as it doesn’t vary (5000 is pretty safe)
- Style I have as custom with -1 -1 -1
- Color as D-Cinelike.
- This gives an almost washed out/de saturated image, but is a great starting point for the post production process.
the Shutter Symbol settings :
- ISO as low as you can go for the light conditions with the aperture as below, I always try and stay at 100 to 200 for the P4P
- Aperture at 5.6. I have tried up and down the aperture range and find best sharpness and edge to edge performance for the P4P sensor is 5.6, but like I said earlier, you have a go and see what works for you. If the light is really low sometimes I have to stop down lower. And in brilliant midday sun I generally stop up to f8.0 or so for some shots. But never vary the aperture during a pano. Keep this on one setting for all the images in a single panorama.
- Shutter speed is what I adjust every set of images I take. Will explain further, but contrary to other suggestions for creating panos, I always adjust shutter speed to make the EV readout either 0.0 or just over exposed at +0.7 or so.
in the Cog Wheel settings, the important ones for me are :
- Histogram on
- AFC on
- Lock Gimbal whilst shooting on
- Overexposure On
- Head LEDs Auto Turn off (for dusk panos a must!)
One other random setting is I allow for the gimbal to pitch an extended 30degrees upward as sometimes that suits the position of where I happen to be and the scene I am trying to capture, generally high placed clouds. just be careful that you don’t pitch too far up and the props in frame - very annoying and way to hard in post to get rid of them all !

*©LesWillPhoto Lake Sunset : 7 sets by 2 rows, AEB 5 images per set equals 70 images, f5.6, various shutter speeds but not varying too much from 1/80, and ISO fixed at 100.*

So now that all our settings are set launch the bird and fly off to where you want to position your self to be able to pan as far as you want to in order to capture the breadth of your pano, as well as making sure that it visually works and will look good in the expanded frame so to speak. Height wise I would rarely be above 75m or so for these types of panos, and sometimes lower is of better composition. it really depends upon your horizon and landscape of course.

3. In the air …..

So once in place with the drone I tend to start right to left top then tilt the gimbal down and go left to right to finish. To start I always dial up a shutter that will give me either e black and white frame and take the shot so I know that my next frames are my starting frames etc - very handy when you have 5 batteries and take panos over and over and over …..

So I pan right to left, taking note of the third grid pattern on my screen and I always overlap by at least 35% to 40% - if its a complex scene with lots of colour and clouds, 50% to 60%. I move consistently thru the scene usually 7 or 8 moves along the horizon. Each shutter produces 5 images (as we have AEB set to 5) so stay still and don’t move until the card stops writing (the outer ring of the shutter button on the screen stops spinning). Then move along and take the next set. After you have down one pan right to left, drop the gimbal down and again allow for a 30% to 40% overlap on the horizontal, and start again the other, with the same amount of stops. Each move adjust the shutter speed to get an EV of 0 or +0.7 - which ever one you decide. You can have some variance on these as I find the clouds and contrast all blend in anyways and you are hard stretched to spot the variations with the human eye once processed.

At the end of this you will have done two pans of say 7 stops, each of 5 images, so you will have 14 by 5 equals 70 shots to process ! I then take a white or black frame and fly to my next location and do it all again - or stay in the same spot and catch the light changes and do it all again ….

4. Back on the ground and process workflow

I keep it pretty simple after again much trial and error - here are the steps I take to produce these types of panos :

My Workflow :

Import in to Lightroom. If everything went well with the shoot, I sometimes use the great LR plug in LRenfuse which can batch process AEB images. Otherwise I just use the recently upgraded HDR Panorama feature in LR. If I know the shots or scene was pretty special, I will first process each set of 5 bracketed shots in Photoshop as HDR, then merge them in to a panorama after that. I only correct chromatic aberration and lens profile before starting the above processes.
If the scene is complex or lots of great looking clouds etc sometimes LR and PS just don’t cut the mustard with regards to their pano stitching skills, so I use the great French program from apg. Its so good and almost NEVER fails to stitch a great pano together sometimes from absolute rubbish ! Do your stacks, Her them or merge them, then export as 16 bit TIFF in to apg and off you go. For LR, PS and apg, I find spherical panorama processing as the best one in almost every case.
So once you have your stitched pano in whatever format, I use LR if I am in a hurry or PS to do the next round of adjustments, and of course this is all down to personal taste and what it is you are trying to convey.
I do these as a base level :
1. content aware fill for any edges and sides that need filling out. I tend to set the image size to a ratio of 2.5:1 but again this is up to personal taste
2. curves adjustments to bring out the darks and lights
3. contrast adjustments using the Nik Color Efex Pro 4 (Landscape/Pro Contrast tab)
4. some sharpening using an inverted mask and the High Pass filter in PS (google Phlearn Sharpening to find out)

Thats about it !

Good luck with all your attempts and hope some of this is useful. You can also mix it up a bit and do vertical panos as per below. Google these again as there are some much better and trippier examples on the web.

Have fun up there !

LesWillPhoto - Blog

Workflow of how to capture and process Aerial Panoramas using a Phantom 4 Pro Drone