Message from Laurence Griffiths
I am a civil engineer and come originally from South Africa. I have lived in Australia since 1995 and have come to love this vast sunburnt land and its people. I now consider myself Australian.
I have also previously lived in New Zealand and Zimbabwe. I bought myself an Olympus OM2n in December 1980 and had it with me for most of the time I was in Zimbabwe. In September 2012, I bought a PlusTek slide scanner and started digitising my old African slides. As of December 2013, I am approximately three-quarters of the way through the 3,000 to 3,500 slides.
I first got into digital photography via a little Olympus MJU500. Sadly, that little camera is no longer operational. - An argument with a stretch of road I was inspecting! I replaced it with an Olympus MJU810, an Olympus E-300 and then, in early 2008, I bought an Olympus E-3.
I take all my E-series photographs in raw format and then used to edit and process them using Bibble Pro, but later started using Olympus Viewer for processing images taken with my Olympus cameras as I grew tired of waiting for the final release of Bibble 5 and Olympus' new raw file conversion engine left Bibble cold. After Bibble 5 was released, I was sorry to say that was still the case.
With the release of the Olympus OM-D E-M1 in late 2013, I was unimpressed with Olympus' lack of full support with their four-thirds system and my great series of four-thirds lenses. I decided that the time had come to "jump ship". It was a close call between Nikon and Canon, but I finally decided to go with Canon. In October 2013, I bought a Canon EOS-6D. I still continued to take all my photos in RAW format, but started using Adobe Lightroom 5 fpr processing them.
When it became clear that Adobe were moving towards a subscription model, I started to look at alternatives. Phase One's Capture One Pro caught my attention and I decided to give it a try. Much to my surprise, I found it better suited to my workflow than Lightroom. So I switched. I still keep a fully updated copy of Lightroom "just in case" and play around with it every now and then. In my opinion, the latest version of Lightroom (Version 6) is still not good enough to persuade me to "jump ship".
Regarding cameras, I didn't ditch Olympus entirely. - My Olympus XZ-2 remained an amazing "carry everywhere" camera. But then I looked at my array of Zuiko lenses........ I went to our local camera store and tried out an Olympus OM-D E-M1 with an MMF-3 adaptor to allow the use of four-thirds lenses. It worked well. So I bought it!
I am now running a mixture of Olympus and Canon gear and use each in situations best suited to its capabilities.
Below is a map of the countries that I have visited (in red):-
create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide
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