He left out one important factor in that equation...luck. What digital technology gives you is ability to take a multitude of shots at no cost, and the luxury of being able to shuffle through the drek to find the perfect lucky shot, and then discard the rest.
In the kind of real-time photography he does, he doesn't have much control over the composition.
In my opinion, the Time cover photo, isn't remarkable at all. I sought out the original, and the complete concropped version shows some guy playing around in the water with the waves breaking in the background, and wasn't quite the cataclysmic event that Time wanted for their cover.
But I wonder what Lowy thinks about Time's dishonest crop job?
Oops, “concropped” = “uncropped”. /facepalm
Lowy shows the cropped photo among the photos on his webpage. . . So I think he may have done the cropping himself. I find it the ultimate of ironies that we have people on here arguing that iPhone images are not suitable for blowing up and cropping . . . yet here we have an iPhone image blown up and cropped to be used for a major magazine's cover image. Kind of disproves their argument.