Phil Lowe

Your flabber was gasted??? Well my flibber was tigibitted once, and it took a team of doctors 14 hours to fix it! Cost a small fortune, too! (But all is good with the world now! Michigan beat Indiana and is off to crush Ohio State!)

Damn aliens. Cameraphobes! 🤣

Why is it with all these cameras and photographers, no one has yet gotten a sharp picture of a UFO? 🤔

Thank you!

Thank you, Laurin. Looking forward to getting this hernia fixed and getting on with my life.

Hernia surgery Monday. Will be laid up 6-8 weeks. Hernia is between lower ribs on left side and very close to spleen. If spleen starts bleeding, they'll have to remove it. Hopefully, this will fix it for good.

Thanks, Tom! Actually, they ended up using everything I shot! Four images here: https://www.chronicleonline.com/news/local/marine-corps-birthday-ball/collection_0a47d800-e5e2-11e8-b071-0352717a31fb.html I was shooting that ballroom with bounced flash at ISO 4000 on my 5D4 with the Sigma 24-105 Art. Definitely need to look into a 24-70 f/2.8! And six here: https://www.chronicleonline.com/news/local/dragon-boaters-race-on/collection_af42f248-e562-11e8-9780-e70f5d5fe1d0.html Nikon D500 with Tamron 70-200 G2 for this one:

Was shooting the Hernando Dragonboat [sic] Festival Saturday morning down here in Hernando, FL, when I heard that there was a team that had made the trip out to compete all the way from Tacoma, Washington! One of the guys on the team lived on the same street I did! Very small world! So I took their team photo and got them to take a pic of me with my phone. I sent a couple of pics back to my old TV station news department back in Seattle. If you were watching Q13 News tonight, you might have seen the story! Getting back in the water Sunday morning, spending one-on-one time with a dive instructor to refresh some of my diving skills, then it's back in open water for me.

After 35+ years of hauling a TV news camera around, I broke new ground tonight with my first freelance newspaper assignment: an elementary school science fair. I'd share the photos, but "work for hire" and all. If the newspaper posts them in its online edition, I'll pass along the link.

Dynamic range is the biggest and best improvement of all. Before post: After 1-frame HDR post-process: Better, faster focusing system (same as in 1DX MkII), 7 vs. 6 fps burst rate, pristine 4K video OOC, DPAF, touch screen for setting focus points. The EOS R is a slight upgrade to the 5D MkIV in terms of usability and instant feedback due to the EVF. It's a major downgrade in others: 1 card slot, way slower burst mode, to name two. The 5D MkIV is still Canon's premiere professional all-around camera, and that won't change until Canon releases a true mirrorless upgrade to it.

When you looked at this tree, I'd be willing to bet that this is what you saw: Nice vibrant purple/lavender against a bright blue sky. Pretty image. This is what you produced from it: The colors are muddy and muted and the tree is underexposed. There's nothing wrong shooting a scene this simple, I guess. The key is to make it compelling. That's the hard part.

Holy S%$#! That dog looks like Hugh Jackman's werewolf in Van Helsing!!! LOL! Well, close anyway! LMAO!

Learn basic composition. If you cannot at least compose your subject to the "rule of thirds", fill the frame with it. Besides being low commercial value (which is true of most of your port so far), you've got everything in the circled areas dead center in the frame. And your "beautiful bird" is too far away to really tell what kind of bird or how beautiful it is. In this image, you got closer to your subject (it's soft), but the frame is filled with numerous distracting background objects (indicated by the red arrows). You tell me in the description that this is a "dangerous spider" but you don't tell me what kind. To be honest, your work isn't selling because you're not ready to shoot marketable images. Just getting your images accepted here is no guarantee that your work will ever sell. It has to be technically much better than these to sell. For a long time most of my port was wildlife. It's how I made most of my sales here (and wildlife is not a big seller, trust me). But if you're going to do it, you're going to need good, long glass, and you're going to have to outshoot your competition. Me, for one. If you're going to do flowers, you're going to have to invest in good macro or medium telephoto glass and light them well. And you're going to have to do it better than people who have been selling them here a lot longer than you. Again, me, for one. I'm sure, by now, you feel pretty beat up and that you can't do this. Ask yourself why anyone would buy any images in your portfolio, when there are so many high quality images to choose from. Become your own worst critic. Here's an example of my first 8-of-10 that were accepted here: I did not get accepted here on my first try. People here, who looked at my work, said it needed work. So I took the 30 days I needed to wait before applying again, and worked on shooting the 8 numbered pictures shown above. When I came back with these, they were accepted. Even then, it took a while to sell my first picture. So to recap: Improve the technical and commercial quality of your images; Must work harder at writing better descriptions; While I haven't looked at your keywords, I'm guessing that they aren't much better than your descriptions. improve them, too. And above all, don't get discouraged. If you really want to become a better photographer, doing this will help you improve so long as you put your best effort into it. IMHO.

Beautiful work, Laurin. And thank you.