Phil Lowe

I flooded my EOS 630 film camera in Lake Huron once. Took it out of the housing, got it back to my motel room and started gently blow-drying it. Left it on the heater overnight and it was good as new. Still have it and works to this day. Cause of the flood was an improperly captured and pinched o-ring.

Road ahead is still long: pending divorce means I'll have to fly back to Tacoma in October to deal with that. Will need hernia surgery ASAP so that I can even lift an aluminum 80 over my head again, and my next cancer battleground may be in my lungs. But my mom is home from rehab now, and helping her takes my mind off all this other stuff. Still lots to do, but trying to eat this elephant one bite at a time. 😉 As far as the newer Sonys go, I still like the solid feel of the larger DSLRs in my hands. And I still love the pictures I get from my Canon and Nikons. 😊

I am a NAUI certified ice and rescue diver and taught NAUI classes on underwater photography through a dive shop in SE Michigan. While I still possess all of those certifications, it's been a long time since I've been in my dry suit and full gear for a dive. Moving back to Florida has rekindled my love of the sport, but I'm going to get slowly back into it, starting with snorkeling some of the springs around my new residence. And, since I can't be anywhere without at least one camera, I recently acquired a Sony A6000 and underwater housing for it. The reason for going cheap on the camera is because, truth be told, any camera you take underwater is at risk of being flooded. I wasn't about to risk my Canon 5D4 or even my Nikon D500 to do underwater photography. At less than $600 new, the A6000 is a loss I can live with if the unthinkable happens. I got it with the attached E-mount 16-50 (24-75mm ff eq.) kit lens, which every review I've read of it says it stinks. In my preliminary shooting with the camera, I haven't found that to be the case, but I haven't really pushed it, either. The image quality from this camera is better than my old 7D MkII (not by much) but not as good as my D500. It's certainly nowhere near as good as my 5D4, but the latter is a $3500 camera. It had better be better! It certainly is small and light, but I can see how putting any big lens on this, especially with a Metabones, would make this an unwieldy monster to handle. A tiny grip and lack of any real mass would not balance it well with, say, a Canon 100-400L lens with adapter. And, as I have no real interest in shooting with this camera except where copious amounts of warm water and surf are involved, the 16-50 will be the only lens I put on it. I took it out for a test shoot today to get familiar with the controls before my first dive with it. People aren't kidding about Sony's messed up menus, especially on these older cameras, but they're nothing I can't handle. Hey, I learned to edit with Final Cut Pro X, after all. You can't get much more messed up than that! This is one of those test shots I took today. As is the case with all my other cameras, I'm shooting raw + jpg. This and one other shot are pending here. I'm really looking forward to getting back in the water and shooting some of Florida's underwater wildlife! I called this shot, "Getting the rainbow before the storm." The sun and breeze were hitting the fountain just right, causing a rainbow to form in the fountain's mist, and making the fountain look like it was on fire. The inclusion of the storm clouds upper left inspired the description. Very cool little camera, but I'm not selling all my stuff and going Sony yet.

If you add a "boost" to more than 1+ million images a week, how does that really help any single image in that boosted group? I think the slow sales has more to do with seasonal trends. It's summer. Most people who might be buying images are on vacation. Contributors who focus on holiday themes, like Christmas, probably aren't selling a lot of that kind of work right now, new or old. I had a $5.45 sales month in July, 2017. My July this year was more than 20X that. I don't know how much of that had to do with any algorithm or people just needing what I was offering more this year. Sales is a fickle animal. For my part, I'm simply going to continue uploading and hope that what I put up buyers will find useful.

This one sold yesterday, very soon after being submitted. When my tabletop opioid series was new, those images were selling as soon as I got them up. It all depends on what the buyer wants and whether you're the one to provide it.

LOL!

One of my newly approved images from the Badlands: selfie guy standing on a cliff edge with what looked like about at least a 50' vertical drop. Caption reads: The soil on these pinnacles is eroded and loose. One false step and one would not be likely to survive.

Made it to my new home in Florida last night around midnight. Got 41 trip shots submitted, 48 still waiting to submit, and probably 20 I need to finish up the editing on. By far, it's my largest batch ever submitted at one time, and I'm desperately excited to see how many weird rejections I get! 😁

45 images sent up with about 25 more I'm still editing. One casualty of this trip...lost the AC cord and power adapter to my MacBook Pro. Will be stopping at a nearby Apple store in Knoxville, Tennessee in the morning to get a new one. I'm very pleased with the pictures I'm getting out of my Nikon D7200. For a camera that was released in 2015, it still looks great compared to both my Nikon D500 and Canon 5D4, which are much newer cameras. I'm probably just going to leave the Tamron 18-400 on it all the time and take it wherever I go. Since Florida "spring country" will be my new home, I'm going to add a sit-on-top kayak to take to the river with my GoPro and snorkeling gear to get underwater pics of the manatees here. I've been in the water with them before, and they are awesome animals. A kayak is the safest way to approach them, as they can't be harmed as they could with a power boat and propeller. Next time I post, it will be from my residence in Florida. Thank you all for the comments!

Thanks, guys. Don't know if, or when, I'll ever get this way again, so wanted to put the time in getting some nice images. I have been to the Grand Canyon, Mt. Rainier, and The Badlands National Parks, and of the three Badlands is my favorite. I could spend a month there shooting the scenery - most of it right by the side of the road - and never get it all. The first shot was taken with the D7200/Tamron 18-400 combo at a point where the sun (near sunset) had just come out from behind the clouds, and "light painted" a very small section of the landscape there. Best time to go there is early in the morning, or late afternoon/evening, when the sun is bringing out all the incredible colors in the rock formations there. The three Sturgis pics were taken with the 5D MkIV using the Sigma 24-105 f/4 Art, and the last Badlands shot was taken with the 5D MkIV and Canon EF16-35L f/4, a lens seemingly made just for photography here!

Left Tacoma, Washington Friday afternoon bound for Florida via Detroit, Michigan. Most of my stuff being shipped there in a moving container, but car is still really full! Nevertheless, I did manage to make room for two cameras and attached lenses in the front seat: my Canon 5D MkIV and Nikon D7200 (my Nikon D500 was packed in my "Nikon bag".) I spent most of my time in South Dakota Sunday visiting Sturgis, for the biker rally held there every year, and The Badlands National Park. I had never been to Sturgis before, but being there was a blast even for someone who doesn't ride a motorcycle! Expect to see a lot of new pics in my port once I get to Florida, including lots of editorials from Sturgis! Here is just a small sample...

These are your newest images These are mine: Right up front, I'm not even going to talk about commercial viability. I'm not even going to suggest that mine are more commercially viable than yours. That's what the buyer decides, not us. But when you look at these two groups of photos, which group leaves a better impression on buyers? Which group offers consistently better exposure, lighting, composition, focus, and subject selection? If you just want sales, you need offer up technically better photos for sale. And if you want to succeed at this, your photos will not only have to be at least as good as the best here that there is (not suggesting that's me), but they will also have to be highly commercially viable. And you need a lot more of them. In other words, learn how to use your camera. Period. Then, start taking and submitting better pictures with it. If you got into this thinking you were going to get rich quick overnight, you were either sorely mistaken or badly misled.