The sensor of small cameras installed on modern drones do not allow shooting at night due to insufficient lighting. Usually, landscape photographers put the camera on a tripod for night shooting and make long exposures up to several tens of seconds.

But you can't put a tripod in the air, although the drone camera stabilizer allows you to make exposures up to one or even two seconds in the calm weather.

However, once a month there is a period of about three days when it is possible to take a beautiful night photo without a tripod. This is the full moon time.

During the full moon, the moon illuminates the earth's surface with maximum brightness, so that objects even cast shadows.

Unfortunately, for a photo from a drone, one full moon is not enough. The fact is that the light of the moon, even on a full moon, is not enough to illuminate dark objects, such as the earth, sea, forest. Light objects, for example, light buildings, are more or less well illuminated. Everything which is covered with snow are well illuminated too - mountains, rivers, fields.

But there are certain difficulties with snow in the Maldives. It would be untrue to say that there is no snow at all in the Maldives. A small amount of it can be found in every refrigerator, but it can't help us with night photography.

But likely, in addition to snow, there are other objects that are white - clouds. If you fly a drone above the cloud level, the upper part of the clouds will be very well lit by the moon, and this will greatly help with night photography.

Here we encounter another problem. Clouds in the Maldives are usually at an altitude of 700-800 meters and higher, and the most popular in the world DJI drones have a height limit locked at 500 meters. There is a solution - you need to replace the drone firmware with a custom one, where the height is unlocked. Such firmware can be found on the Internet if desired.

The last difficulty is the wind. Usually the wind accompanies the clouds and drives them across the sky, but we need clouds without wind, or with a light wind, so that the clouds remain motionless for at least a few seconds.

Well, we also need luck. If there are beautiful clouds in the lower layers of the atmosphere, there should be no high clouds in the sky that scatter the moonlight.

As a result, in order to take a night photo with a drone, several conditions must coincide:

1. you must be near an interesting object during a full moon

2. the presence of low clouds that we will shoot

3. no high clouds that cover the moon

4. light wind

5. a drone with an unlocked altitude limit and lights turned off.

As a result, if all the above factors coincide, we will get a panorama like this!

Photo by: Oleg Gaponyuk 

October 4, 2024