What makes the difference between a beginner drone pilot and a professional
one? What are some things that intermediate or even advanced pilots do
that beginners don't? As you become more experienced and comfortable flying a drone there are some things that you can start doing to make your experience more enjoyable as well as more efficient.

Here are just three things that you can do that will let you know you are on your way to becoming a more professional drone pilot.

The first thing that moves you from beginner status into intermediate is hand launching and hand catching your drone. I always recommend that beginners use a landing pad and that's mostly for safety reasons but it's also to give confidence to anxious pilots that are concerned about precision.

It just helps those new pilots to be more comfortable that their drone is going to
come right back to where they launched it from, but there may be times where
it's just not feasible to use a landing pad or even appropriate for you to set
your drone on the ground and that's why it's important to practice hand
launching and hand catching your drone.

Practice it about 10 times and you'll have it.

Another transition to becoming an intermediate drone pilot from a beginner drone pilot is to use the tools that are available to you on the app whether it be the dji fly up or the dji go 4 app. But there's a couple things that you need to start using that's going to make you a better drone videographer and cinematographer. You're going to click on the settings and go to

camera. Then the first thing that you're going to check on is the histogram. You will want it to be well balanced. Basically this shows you the balance of the highlights and the lows. To make sure that you got this set right number one look at your histogram you can see there that the shadows and the highlights are pretty well balanced. The other thing is to look at your compensation.

Intermediate and pro drone pilots use the grid lines and this is just to make sure that you're getting proper composition in your images. If you've never used those grid lines before just know that they're kind of distracting at
first, it takes a while to get used to them but after just a few flights you
realize that you kind of look past them.

The third and final best practice that you should start doing to make yourself a better drone pilot is to research the area that you're going to be flying in. 

To find some of the best spots to fly from, you can go on google maps and just
explore the area of estes parks and the surrounding areas. Look for good parking spaces. And then open up the aloft app to make sure that the airspace that you want to fly in is uncontrolled.