Myrtle Beach + Waterpoof Cameras = Good Times
July 2024 Livia gifted me an OM TG-7 on my birthday. Nearly one year later, in June 2025, I got Livia one for her birthday, just in time for a beach vacation trip with the whole Krupar family in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. (I previously insisted we would take turns with the one camera we had, but I couldn’t imagine taking photos alone, so hopped on good old ebay, found a nice seller with a fair price and ordered it up!)
Livia yellow, Tim orange. Big waves make wrist straps a good idea 💡
Taking photos in the ocean isn’t the same as shooting photos in the street (duh 🙄). As street photographers we often reduce entire cities into just one street corner or fragment thereof. The ocean is so V A S T and open, which presents the challenge of creating interesting compositions. We found facing the shore line helped:
And sometimes not:
Livia experimented with above/underwater photos in the lazy river:
And she also made some other pure underwater magic there:
Overall we found them to be great cameras. While we’re accustomed to zone focusing with manual focus lenses in the street, the autofocus system performed quite well. The flash is fun/useful, the interface rather easy to adjust to, it’s nice to be able to zoom in and out, and the files are quite nice to work with. We did find the wrist strap that comes in the box to be not so useful, and we highly recommend applying a screen protector right away as the lcd scratches fairly easily.
Overall we can recommend the OM TG7 as a fun way to play with photography where conventional cameras cannot go (but always watch your back when you’re in the ocean 😉)
