I hear you....I know. Your work is high quality. I don't know what the answer is. I see a lot of people like you get pennies for your work and I don't understand why.

I was looking at your post count - and that counts for comments as well. I compared it to a few people (Dan) to see how many they had vs you....from joining in relatively the same time period. You are showing 980 posts and Dan is showing 3557. Your post number will definitely affect your rep and the number of followers. The more you comment, the more posts you will have, the more exposure and ultimately the more followers.

Set yourself a number. I do this. I try to hit a goal of x number of comments to reach y. So your first goal could be to get your post number to 1000. Follow a few more people too. After a month you can weed the numbers to those who are active supporters.

You like science. Follow a few of them. You like chocolate...that too. You are an awesome photographer. Do those boring challenges. While doing them, connect with others who are following the challenge. That's how I did it. Use #photofeed and #photomatic for your photos. They travel around highlighting posts.

You are a cool person. Deep. Thoughtful. Artistic. A story catcher. Who knows...you might catch a story or two on your travels through deep steemit :)

I'm resteeming this post to see if anyone sees it on my blog.

Hope this helps. :)