Pilot briefing · Dragonfly Drones
Pilot briefing
The spec for a commercial property shoot — settings, framing, counts and safety. Read it before you go out, and check your work before you leave the site. Jobs that miss the spec have to be reshot.
- Sky, stills
- 75% cloud or less
- Sky, video
- 50% cloud or less
- Shoot window
- 10am – 4pm local
- Read time
- 8 minutes
Before you go
Most reshoots are decided before you leave the house
Four checks, and every one of them is faster than a second trip.
Check the sky
Stills only: about 75% cloud or less. Full overcast is often fine because we can replace the sky, but check with us first. If the job includes video, you want about 50% cloud or less — sky replacement on video rarely holds up.
Check the ground
Do not shoot if the parking lot is soaking wet or holding large puddles. Clients almost always reject that imagery, and the trip is wasted.
Confirm it is safe to fly
Read the forecast before you drive, not after. Weather is a safety call first and a quality call second. If it is marginal, tell us and we will move the date.
Confirm the site is open
Shoot between 10am and 4pm local time unless you are told otherwise. Look up the business hours first — a busy lot makes a property look alive, an empty one does not.
Settings
The baseline, on every job
Drone, DSLR or phone. When in doubt: full auto, RAW format.
- Format
- RAW preferred
- Image size
- 4:3 or 3:2
- White balance
- Auto
- Focus
- Auto
- Exposure
- Auto, AE unlocked
- ISO outdoors
- 100 to 400
- ISO indoors
- Cap at 800
- Orientation
- Landscape only
Drone: watch the EV, not the screen
Your phone or tablet dims and brightens itself for heat and sunlight, and none of that has anything to do with the exposure of the picture you are taking. Adjusting EV because the screen looks bright or dim is how you end up with washed-out or muddy frames.
The only honest reading is the EV number. Keep it at 0.0, or within a few tenths either side, whatever the screen looks like at that moment.
Drone: AE Lock stays unlocked for stills
Exposure Lock is useful for video and destructive for stills. Left locked, it strands the ISO high and you get blown out, grainy frames.
Unlocked, the aircraft handles ISO and exposure shot to shot. On a sunny or partly cloudy day that lands between ISO 100 and 400 on its own.
Phone: wipe the lens between shots
This is the single biggest problem we see on phone imagery. You hold the phone by its lenses all day without thinking about it, and the fingerprints turn into haze the moment you shoot toward the sun.
On iPhone Pro models, switch the camera to RAW. It is the difference between a professional frame and a smudgy, low-resolution one.
Glass
What usually goes wrong with the gear
Six habits that separate a clean set from a reshoot.
No add-on filters
Especially on stills. In practice they cause more problems than they solve — soft coatings, smudges on the rear element, the wrong filter for the light. A bare lens is the right answer nearly every time.
Wide, but never fisheye
A 10–18mm is close to perfect for exteriors and interiors both. Anything that goes wider than 10mm bends the image past what distortion correction can straighten out afterwards.
Frame in the viewfinder
On a DSLR the rear screen is for reviewing, not composing. Frames set up on the LCD come out more crooked and less sharp, and the viewfinder resolves detail the screen cannot.
Steady the camera
A tripod, or even a twenty dollar monopod, is what keeps stills level and crisp. Optional outdoors in good light, effectively mandatory for interiors and twilight.
No date stamps
Nothing burned into the frame. Turn the overlay off before you shoot.
No portrait or selfie orientation
Landscape on everything. Tall narrow frames do not work for commercial real estate. The only real exception is a tight interior such as an apartment bathroom.
The job
Three pillars of a good commercial property shoot
Every shot list is built out of these three ideas. Understand them and the numbered shots stop being a list to memorise.
Wide comprehensive shots
Ground level or low aerial, showing the whole property in one frame — building and parking lot on a retail or industrial site, or several structures together on an apartment site. The viewer sees the whole puzzle instead of a few pieces of it.
Closeup inspection shots
Low level, around 15 feet up — roughly as high as the store signage on the face of the building. Close enough to read the construction and the signage. On a small building the whole front face fits corner to corner; on a strip mall it is fine to group two or three tenants in one frame.
Mid and high-level area shots
Here you stop inspecting the property and start describing where it sits. What surrounds it, how the street and highway access works, what other businesses are nearby. A property set into a busy retail area is a selling point in itself.
Every job needs a cover shot
The client is looking for one frontal image that sums up the whole property — the one that goes on the front of an offering memorandum. Usually a wide frontal, ground level or low aerial.
It might be one of the numbered shots, or one you choose yourself. Either way, make sure you come home with one.
Leave a space cushion
One of the most common client complaints is that the building is jammed against the edges of the frame, or that the corners are chopped off.
Leave 10 to 15 percent clear on the left and right of the building. More than that is fine.
If in doubt, take the shot anyway
If the angle the list calls for is junky, overgrown or blocked by something, shoot it regardless. It is far quicker than explaining why you skipped it.
The picture explains itself, and it shows the site was covered properly. The client decides whether to use it.
Shot framing
How the numbered shots are framed
Shots can be taken in any order — the numbers describe the angle, not the sequence. The ones marked critical are the frames worth going back for.
Frontal, ground level
Faces the front of the property, and it is the most important frame of the shoot. Left and right corners both in shot, sky above the roof, ground below the building, nothing chopped off. The building fills about 80 percent of the frame. Shots 3, 5 and 7 are framed the same way from the other sides. On a wide strip mall, take this one from the drone at 10 to 15 feet instead, to clear cars and trees in the lot.
Front-left corner
Faces the front-left corner, so the left-rear corner and the right-front corner are both visible. Same rules apply: no chopped corners, sky above, ground below, building filling about 80 percent of the frame. Shots 2, 4 and 6 are the same idea taken from their own corners.
Pylon sign
The whole pylon sign in frame, not chopped, with at least part of the subject property visible alongside it. Ground or aerial both work, and the sign does not have to be in the foreground — any arrangement that gets both into one image is fine. If something has to give, keep the whole sign and as much of the building front as you can.
Aerial closeups
About 15 feet above ground and not above the roof line, roughly 30 feet out from the nearest corner at about 45 degrees off it. The front face of the building sits near the centre of the frame with some of the parking lot showing. Shot 28 is taken off the left-front corner, shot 29 off the right-front corner. Closeup means close.
Frontal offsets
Also about 15 feet up, but taken from back where you stood for shot 1. Front face of the property again, offset from centre far enough that a slim strip of the side wall shows — 30 offset toward the left side, 31 toward the right.
150 and 350 foot aerials
Leave a thin strip of sky along the top, 10 to 15 percent, never more than 20. The property can fill anywhere from 20 to 80 percent of the frame side to side, depending on what makes it look best. Climb near the property, pitch until you have the sky strip, then back off just enough to centre the whole site and its parking in the bottom half of the frame — no further, or you burn batteries and lose line of sight.
Bird’s eye
Top-down from 350 feet, showing the building and the immediate parking area. Only needed on properties of about two acres or less — anything larger will not fit in the frame without being chopped.
Beauty shots and amenities
Freestyle, and your chance to show some judgement. Mailboxes, pools, tennis and basketball courts, playgrounds, washroom buildings, landscaping. Frame them however shows them best. On a large site, a frame taking in several buildings sells the sense of a neighbourhood.
Interiors
Interiors, when the job calls for them
Most jobs will not need them. Check the job details before you go out so you are not driving back for them.
Setup
Tripod or monopod at about three or four feet. Same settings as outside — RAW, 4:3, auto white balance.
Shoot from the far corner of the room, wide across it. That gives the most detail, particularly in small rooms and small apartments.
Light it properly
Open every curtain and blind for natural light, and switch on every artificial light in the room.
If there are still dark spots, a shop light with a soft white LED bulb on a second tripod, aimed upward to wash the walls and ceiling, fixes it cheaply. Keep that second tripod out of frame.
The two things that ruin interiors
Grain, because the camera picked ISO 1600 or 3200, and soft focus, because autofocus struggles in low light.
Cap ISO at 800, shoot aperture priority between f/8 and f/16 for depth of field, and use manual focus. Check focus through the viewfinder, not the rear screen.
Twilight
Dusk and night work
Not technical, but completely unforgiving of a shaky camera or a missed focus.
A tripod is not optional
Handheld dusk frames smear, and the whole set comes back unusable. A basic twenty to thirty dollar tripod is enough.
Bracket it, three at a time
Three exposures per position is plenty — never five. Combined in post, and with a twilight sky replacement, three brackets make a genuinely good image.
Most modern bodies and DJI aircraft can be set up for this in a couple of minutes.
Focus manually, near infinity
Autofocus struggles badly at night, and you will not spot the miss on a small screen until you are home.
Set focus in daylight on something more than 30 feet away, mark the focus ring with a pencil, and check the mark often while you shoot. Do a test run on another night first.
Larger sites
Strip malls of about three acres and up
More frames and more ground to cover, but straightforward once you plan the route rather than following the list top to bottom.
Skip the ground-level back alley shots
On strip malls of about three acres and over, skip the ground-based rear loading area frames — shots 4, 5 and 6. Those areas can be unsafe to walk with trucks unloading, and clients rarely use them anyway.
Do not skip the rear and side aerials
Shots 18 to 27 cover the same ground from the air, and those frames matter. They are among the most important on the larger sites.
Work the site in zones
Split it into two or three zones and finish one at a time, taking every ground and aerial angle for that area before moving on. You will jump around the shot list, but you stay close to the aircraft, which keeps line of sight good and gets you to it quickly on a low battery.
Shoot the frontals from the drone
On a strip centre, take the ground-level frontals with the aircraft at about 15 feet so you clear the parked cars. Position at the back of the lot, or across the street if you need to, far enough back to get the centre left to right in one frame. If it is too long for that, shoot it in sections.
One angled closeup per tenant
Every store gets one: ground level if nothing is parked in front of it, or a 15 foot drone shot to clear the cars if there is. Two or three small units can share a frame. Shoot from whichever side faces away from the sun to avoid glare straight into the lens.
On site
Check your work before you leave the site
Five or ten minutes here saves a two hour round trip. This is the single most useful habit on the page.
Look at them on a laptop
Load the cards and read through the set properly. FastRawViewer is a cheap, fast way to view RAW files in the field, from fastrawviewer.com.
You cannot judge focus on a viewfinder or a phone screen, and nothing is worse than getting home and finding the most important angle of the shoot is soft.
You are checking three things
Frames too crooked to use, focus too soft to use, and exposure that has run too far in either direction.
It is also the moment you catch a card with read or write problems, while you are still standing somewhere you can reshoot.
Then check the list
Print the shot list and tick the numbers off as you get them. It is the fastest way to move around a site without stopping to think about what comes next.
Study it before you arrive; use it while you are there. It is the blueprint for the job.
Delivery
How many photos to send
Shoot as many as you like on site. Cull hard before you upload — volume is not the same as coverage.
Small retail site
About three acres or less.
Mid-size retail strip mall
About three to six acres.
Apartment complex, no interiors
Exteriors, amenities and aerials.
Apartment complex with interiors
Interior sets on top of the above.
Large retail strip mall complex
Six acres and up, with per-tenant closeups.
Bracketing is optional
Never required on any job. It helps on interiors, golden hour and twilight work. Do not bracket ordinary midday outdoor frames.
Three brackets per position, maximum
More than three per position makes upload and download times unmanageable at both ends.
150 photos is the ceiling
Including every bracketed frame. Without brackets, even the largest jobs should land under about 125.
Covering every angle on the list matters far more than volume — a hundred extra frames will not rescue a job that missed the basics.
Safety
Safety matters more than any shot on this page
None of these frames are worth an incident. If a shot cannot be taken safely or legally, it does not get taken.
Keep real line of sight
Never assume you are clear of an obstacle unless you can actually see space between it and the aircraft.
If you cannot tell whether you are in front of, behind or level with something, keep visual separation, climb above it, cross over, then come back down on the other side.
Fly as if you have no sensors
Collision avoidance is not active in every direction, on every aircraft, in every flight mode. On a Mavic 2 Pro the side sensors are inactive unless you are in Tripod or ActiveTrack mode.
Treat the aircraft as though it has none at all and you will not be caught out.
Get LAANC where it is needed
And fly to what it grants you. We will never ask you to do otherwise.
If a shot needs more altitude than the grid square allows, that is a scheduling conversation with us, not a judgement call in the field.
On the day
Two things that come up on site
Both are quick, and both save a phone call later.
Shooting two properties in one day
Only in that case: rename the files to the street name before you upload — Front-Street.DNG, for example.
It keeps the two sets from being confused at our end.
If someone asks what you are doing
Tell them you were hired on behalf of the property owner to take photographs, and that you are not sure how they will be used. Keep it there.
Do not speculate about whether the property is for sale or how the images will be marketed — that can put the owner in a difficult position. If they press, give them our contact details and leave it with us. If a site becomes uncomfortable, you are free to leave and we will take it up with the owner.
Downloads
Shot lists and diagrams
Print the list and diagram for your job type and tick the shots off as you get them. It is the surest way to avoid a reshoot.
Apartment complex
Shot list & diagram — download link to be added
Retail site
Shot list & diagram — download link to be added
Strip mall
Shot list & diagram — download link to be added
Corner-facing site
Shot list & diagram — download link to be added
Upload
Sending your imagery
Cull to the counts above first, then upload the set in one go.
Upload link
To be added — a new upload link will be published here.
Questions before or during a shoot?
If anything on site is unclear — the weather, access, an angle that will not work — get in touch before you pack up. It is always cheaper than a second trip.