4 Tips To Best Fly Your Drone At Night

First of all, let’s quiet the speculation and discuss whether it’s even legal to fly drones at night? The answer: yes! In the UK, there are no restrictions on the hours you can fly UAVs – as long as you are sticking to the CAA guidelines of keeping your drone within sight (or 400ft in altitude or 500m horizontally) and 50m away from people, buildings, vehicles, and other structures. Great news for the adventurous drone users amongst you who are desperate to get your copter up in the night sky!
Of course, drone night flying is not without its complications. Here’s a look at how to enjoy your model after dark, without getting into any trouble:

Fly safe, fly considerately
It’s pretty much the first rule of drone flying in general, but it’s even more important you pay attention to flying safely and considerately when you’re taking your copter out of an evening. Visibility is obviously much lower, resulting in increased risk of collisions. And you’ll run the risk of worrying those who don’t know what a drone is when they see flashing lights in the air. Try to keep night flying to areas where you are far away from others who may be concerned about unidentifiable lights in the sky; you don’t want your UAV shot down or to have people calling the police in a panic.
Even for those who aren’t worried about UFOs, seeing drones of an evening can raise suspicions much quicker than it would in the day. For example, if you’re not careful people might think you are trying to spy in their bedroom windows.
Don’t forget about the consideration of noise too. The buzz of a drone is more disturbing of an evening.

Plan your flight
Avoid potential dangers and if you’re filming the flight, get better video footage by planning your flight in advance. Scout your location, make a note of good launch and landing spots and pinpoint any obstacles (paying attention to how they might be harder to manoeuvre around in the dark). Don’t forget how the environment differs for the pilot of an evening too. Do you need to bring a friend?
Also, take a look ahead at the weather. Pick a calm night, if you’re going for long exposure shots with a drone camera – which are recommended for great night imagery – long shutter speeds need your camera to stay steady for 2-4 seconds. This is more difficult in windy conditions.

Switch camera modes
If you’re planning on using a drone camera, make sure you’ve got your settings on a night friendly mode. Keep the image noise down by choosing a manual setting with ISO at 100-200 and experiment with shutter speeds between 1.5s-4s.
If you want moving light trails (like car lights) go for 2-2.5sec shutter speeds. Check out our post on frame rates.
As much of the footage will be black, you’ll likely get under exposure warnings. Ignore these. Check your shots visually for exposure instead.

Be prepared to edit night drone photography
Night drone photographers should be prepared to do a lot of playing around in post-processing. Take multiple shots in the sky and save them as DNG (RAW) to allow the most information for editing. The reason you want to take many of the same images is because you can guarantee a lot will turn out blurry!
In the edit, play around with white balance settings and try selective colour saturation if you want to give your night shots a unique look.

00:0500:17