A drone shoot is mostly decided before take-off: where you're allowed to fly, how long the batteries really last, and what the light will be doing when you get there.
Being allowed to fly is two permissions, not one, and it's easy to hold only the first. Across the EU and the UK, anything above the lightest class needs the operator registered — you or your business — and needs whoever is at the controls to hold a remote pilot certificate for the category being flown, earned by a test rather than a form. Flying near people or for commercial work can raise that again, and the thresholds are national and revised often, so read your own regulator's page before the shoot.
The site is the other half. Airspace class, local restrictions and permission from whoever owns the ground you take off from all need checking for the exact spot, not the general area, and the conditions need checking on the morning: wind at altitude is routinely stronger than the breeze you feel under it, and cold drains packs faster than the remaining-time estimate suggests. Count usable flight time as batteries times realistic minutes, set a return-to-home altitude that clears the trees, and pick the landing spot before launch.
The optics decide the rest. A small sensor behind a near-fixed aperture is at its best in good light, so timing the flight for the hours a landscape shoot would use does more for the image than any setting, and ND filters keep motion smooth if you're recording video too. Deciding the frames you want in advance — top-down, oblique, one slow reveal — means the battery is spent shooting rather than hunting.
A few things to plan for