DropShots Blog

Do you like going to concerts and taking concert photos? That’s great but there’s one problem – most of the time concert shots don’t turn out too well because of poor lighting and other factors. With that said, there are several things you could do to take better concert photos. Read on to find out all about it. Read more →

Winter holidays are a great time to take lots of cool pictures. And these photos don’t have to be simple family shots – there are lots of opportunities to take lovely photos of Christmas decorations, Hannukah dreidels and winter landscapes. So, let’s make sure your camera is ready for the holidays! Here’s a short checklist that will help.

Check your camera and lenses

The first thing you should do is make sure that your camera is in good working order and the lens (or the lenses for your DSLR) are clean. Use a lens cleaning kit to take care of dirty lenses.

Make sure you have a backup battery

It’s so annoying when your camera’s battery becomes flat when you are about to take a brilliant shot. To prevent that from happening, make sure your camera is fully charged and you have a backup battery.

Make room on your SD card

Do you keep all your unsorted photos on your camera’s SD or microSD card? If yes, then it’s a good idea to move them somewhere else so that you have enough room for new photos. At the very least, sort through your shots, find similar photos and delete the ones you don’t need leaving only the best picture. If you don’t feel like wasting hours on this tedious task, Duplicate Photo Cleaner will help you do the job in minutes. Just run a scan with the similarity threshold set to 80%, examine the results and bulk-delete the images you don’t need.

We wish you happy holidays and lots of beautiful and creative photos!

We all love those beautiful photos with a dreamy blurry background and magical spots of light. That effect is called Bokeh and it’s all about the aesthetic quality of the blur produced in the out-of-focus parts of an image produced by a lens. Actually, “bokeh” means “blur” or “haze” in Japanese. In this post I’m going to share with you some tips how to take amazing bokeh photos.

Be Close to Your Subject

Most photography blogs will tell you that you need to use the right lens to have nice bokeh. But what if you don’t have a dSLR? Well, the good news is that any lens, even your smartphone camera, can produce some kind of bokeh if you do things right. Read more →

There’s nothing as charming as beautiful photos of flowers. I bet you’ve often wanted to try your hand at flower photography… If only you had all that expensive equipment, right? Wrong! You can take stunning photos of flowers with nothing but your smartphone and here are five tips that will help.

1. Use Soft Light to Avoid Sharp Shadows

Flowers are delicate creations and you’d want them to look that way in your photos. In most cases, flowers look their best when they are shot in soft light, which doesn’t produce sharp shadows. The result is an evenly lit subject with every single detail clearly visible. To achieve this, avoid shooting in direct sunlight and wait for the sun to go behind a cloud. And if you’re shooting indoors, avoid using flash at all costs. Read more →

Composition is the key thing in visual arts. A beautifully composed image looks good even if there are minor technical mistakes, but eve the most technically perfect photo or painting looks bad if it lacks composition. While there are tons of composition techniques you can learn, there’s one really simple thing that improves your images a lot – place the subject off center.

While you can create good compositions with the subject placed in the center of the image, it’s safer for beginners to use the rule of thirds or at least try to put the subject anywhere off center. You don’t necessarily have to concentrate on finding the right third to place your subject, but rather look at the subject through a frame and check the following:

• do you have enough space around your subject, so that the image doesn’t appear cluttered?
• how would the viewer’s eye move through the photo and is there anything to guide the viewer’s eye to the subject?
• does the photo tell a story?

Asking yourself these questions will help you decide how and where to place your subject in the photo and add meaning to your photo.

In the end, it’s all about what works for a particular shot and what doesn’t. Always take advantage of your camera being digital and take several versions of the same photo. This way you’ll be able to select the very best shot when you’re ready for post-production and delete the rest, so that they don’t clutter your computer. Premium DropShots members get a program that finds and deletes duplicate and similar photos called Duplicate Photo Cleaner for free. This program is a great time saver, so be sure you check it out and download the trial version here.