Camera settings

Hi everyone and welcome to 3Dsurvey tutorials.

This time we’ll talk about how to set up a camera before attaching it to a drone prior to the flight. Image quality is vital in order to achieve accurate results so it’s important you do this before each flight.

We have the Olympus EP2 with us today. It has a fixed 17mm lens which makes it a great choice for different land surveying projects. You can also try Olympus EP5 or EP7; they’re both similar to EP2 in that respect.

Set the parameters; start by selecting the S mode, which enables you to set shutter speed. Set it between 1000 and 1600; that will help you get sharp images even if you get any vibration from a drone. It’s a sunny day today and we’ll set it to 1600/s.

Aperture is set automatically and helps you correct colours. If the aperture number on your display blinks the light is too low; that mostly happens in winter. Change the shutter speed in that case to achieve optimal results.

Next go and set the ISO – try to set the ISO number as low as possible – we’re setting it to 100.

Continue by playing a bit with other settings: you’ll see different Colour correction options, we’ll set it to Sunny this time.

Go on and set it to Single image, ratio to 4:3, picture quality to its highest – L in our case, Turn off the Flash. Set focus to Single Auto, Face detection to OFF and finish by setting it to All targets.

That’s it, you’re ready to go. Check your battery and memory card before the flight to avoid any inconvenience.