Hi all,

In 2018 I was in Africa for several weeks on 2 separate non-photography tours. While they were enjoyable, I had expected to be able to spend more time photographing the amazing wildlife. I am now making plans to go back in 2021 (we’re busy for the rest of 2020). My focus is on locating and booking a Photography Tour with LOTS of time spent photographing the animals. Kenya is where I would like to spend most, if not all, of my time back in Africa.

It would be very helpful if any of you who have actually been on a photography tour in Africa could make suggestions and recommendations as to a tour leader or company to go with. Hearing both positives and negatives about specific companies and leaders would be much appreciated a d very helpful. Feel free to PM me if you would be more comfortable responding in that manner.

Thanks in advance

For those of you who use Photodex products, like Proshow Gold, or Proshow Producer, this one's for you. I got an email today that Photodex Corporation is shutting down after 30 years.

The replacement they recommend is from the Netherlands, is not a one-time fee, but is subscription based ONLY (Yuk!)....either $10.00/mo or $25.00/mo based on the version. I'll pass on that, thank you.

If you have a license to Proshow, you have until Jan 31, to make sure that you have downloaded the latest version. You can use your current Proshow forever, without support, but make sure that you have saved your Product Registration Key, in case you need to install Proshow on a new computer.

Details at: http://www.photodex.com/shutdown.html

Topaz Labs is one of the only two software programs I'm aware of that will not save your work when you open and process a raw file. It will save an output image but you will not be able to return to the processing you did with the raw file and make any modifications. You have to start from scratch. It will open a raw file but it lacks numerous features that are expected from raw file converters like lens distortion profiles and camera input profiles. For processing raw files I would rate it as unusable.

Luminar was recently released in version 4. It offers much more than Topaz Labs for raw file processing but compared with competitive software it contains some glaring inadequacies. The Windows version remains unstable and too many people report it crashing. Using it feels like your testing a beta and until they get it working it's buggy as hell. It's focused on the "effects" user who enjoys editing their photos by applying canned effects. As an actual image editor it's very frustrating. For example Luminar offers adjustment layers with gradient masks but the gradients are re-editable -- you can't go back and tweak their positioning -- the word stupid is coming to mind.

I'd consider other options. What camera are you using?

Joe