Five Tips For Flying Your Drone at Night
Chicago Abraham Lincoln Park
Arrive in daylight
It is always best to show up before dark. You don't want to be wandering around in the dark looking for a place to take off safely. You also want to give yourself a little extra time to get up in the air and check out the area. You can fly around a bit making sketch images and see what works at various locations and altitudes.
Fly during blue hour
Take some shots during sunset but don't leave after the sun goes down. I am always amused when I see photographers packing up their gear once the sun goes down. You can get some great shots as the sun goes down and lights up the landscape. Then once the sun has gone down land and put in a fresh battery. A fresh battery will give you plenty of time to fly through blue hour. Most night shots you see are not actually shot at night but rather during blue hour. Blue hour here in Washington starts about twenty minutes after sunset. I use the the iPhone app PhotoPills for figuring out sunset and blue hour.
Strobe Light for drone
Flying at night requires a strobe that is visible for three statute miles. Find a small one on Amazon that will fit easily on the top of your drone. I put velcro on the drone and light so that I can attach it for flying at night. I wasn't sure about the glue with the velcro so added a little superglue before attaching.
Push the ISO
Most drones these days come with high quality sensors so you can push the ISO for both stills and video. Sometimes for video I have needed to push the ISO to 12800 since I am usually shooting at 1/50 of a second and 24 fps. It is possible to get great video even at this higher ISO. For stills it is possible to drop the shutter speed a bit and not need such a high ISO. I've shot stills at 1 second with no wind and had great results. The DJI Mavic Pro Cine that I have is a very stable platform. If shooting with a smaller drone you may not be able to shoot at this slow of a speed. It's best to see how far you can push the ISO and shutter speed prior to getting out in the field. I will often fly from my house and try things out before I go out.
Use de-noise software
The software I have been using for stills is DxO PureRAW. I shoot all my images in RAW so the software from DxO has become a critical part of my workflow for night images. I use Adobe Lightroom and DxO fits right in. Once I have selected images I can export directly to the DxO batch process. The process will start up and I click start and can take a break while it processes my images. It will automatically return to Lightroom and have the selected images all together so I can continue with my normal adjustments inside Lightroom. You can fine tune the adjustments DxO makes or choose the defaults.
The software I have been using for video is from Neat. I use Premier Pro for video. Neat fits right in as an effect. I perform noise reduction last as it can make viewing the video sluggish. It does add significant time to your export which is something I plan for when exporting night video. I send my exports to Media Encoder as I work then start the processing and walk away. Depending on your clip length and amount of noise it may take upwards of an hour to process one 20 second clip. Most of my clips are in the 10 to 20 second range. I think if you had quite long clips another software option might be necessary. I did try Topaz Labs a couple of years ago but wasn't that happy with the workflow inside Premier Pro. There may be better options at this point but I haven't researched this for a year or so.