This is about shooting outdoors - architectural and landscape work with an eye to how it looks.

1. Daytime light.

The foundation of everything. The best moment is diffused light, through thin cloud. That is the ideal fill light at any time of year - whereas bright sun will reliably give you deep shadows thrown by buildings and trees.

Below are two examples (crops from panoramas). Both were shot in RAW and processed afterwards, and the difference is still clear.

On the left, sunny weather. On the right, overcast - and in terms of detail held in the shadows, the overcast shot is the better one.

Here is another example worth paying attention to. Broken cloud will lay patches of shadow across your panorama, and even hand-finished post-processing will not hide it:

TIP 1. Pick light overcast - it is the best weather for technical work.

2. Light at dusk and at night.

If shooting RAW (DNG, in DJI's case) and processing afterwards is merely advisable in daylight, for evening and night work it is strongly recommended.

Look up the time of sunset where you are. Dusk gathers over the half hour after that point, and then the street lights come on. At that moment you have roughly another thirty to forty minutes of good evening shooting: the sky has not gone black, night has not fallen, and the landscape has not yet split into the lit and the invisible.

Take my word for it - shooting immediately after dusk and shooting two hours later are two completely different propositions. No sensor and no amount of post-processing will rescue a night shot, unless what you are after is city lights with no detail worked out at all.

Examples shot just after dusk:

TIP 2. Don't wait for night - take off as soon as dusk sets in.

For those who prefer to shoot on the drone's automatic settings: through trial and error I ended up pulling automatic exposure all the way down to −1.7. There is more information held in the shadows, and lifting dark frames out of DNG is no trouble. It also shortens the shutter speed considerably, which means a sharper frame.

The same approach on "auto" works for bright subjects too, where the automatic metering gets the exposure wrong. In the evening it is still better to shoot manually and keep an eye on every setting. Straying from panoramas for a moment: fireworks, for instance, come out better on a long exposure, and that means manual. Left to itself in the evening, the drone will sooner push ISO to a barely usable 1600 or higher than choose a long shutter speed.

TIP 3. Shooting in the evening, pull the exposure down for sharper frames.

3. Shooting early in the morning.

If the sky is overcast and you were hoping for something special at dawn, go back to bed. Under full cloud there is no sunrise - it simply gets light. But if the sun is breaking through the cloud, you will not be waiting long for something beautiful.

There is a catch, though. A rising sun in full glory is far brighter than the ground below it, which at that hour is still in shadow. You have a very short window before the sun turns merely bright and ordinary. Much depends on the state of the atmosphere at that moment, so this one takes trying and experimenting - and again, you count from the moment of sunrise.

Some examples:

TIP 4. Try shooting at sunrise - it is worth it.

4. Shooting after rain.

Shooting after summer rain means the surfaces of buildings and roads, and the foliage on the trees, all read better - fresher, with more contrast and more saturation. Ideal is a sunset muted by rain clouds while the sun still throws its light back across the city.

Here is an evening shot after rain (left), next to an ordinary sunny summer evening (right):

Do bear in mind, though, that half-dried tarmac looks scruffy - and so do puddles on the pavement.

TIP 5. Shooting after rain will add freshness to your panorama.

5. Shooting in windy weather.

Up to 5 m/s, wind strength is of no real consequence for daytime panoramas. In the evening, as mentioned above, reduce the frame's exposure when shooting on automatic settings - that way you help the drone's camera choose a shorter shutter speed.

Of course, wind is never your ally. A drone stabilises itself in moving air as well as it can, but it is still nothing like a tripod.

Incidentally, you can lengthen the exposure for creative effect, but compared with working on a tripod you are limited here to a couple of seconds at most.

In closing

Credit where it is due: quadcopter manufacturers keep improving the automatic functions of their flying cameras. Even in auto mode, into the light, in wind, you can get decent results with a bit of processing afterwards.

Every DJI drone from the Phantoms onward is good at shooting panoramas automatically. How to improve the quality of those panoramas in post-processing is a subject for the next article.