April 28th-30th on Creative Live

In The Complete Lightroom Workflow, Jared will show you how to radically cut your workflow time while improving the quality of your product and the organization of your digital world. Jared will teach you how to:

There’s a good reason why so many professional photographers rely on CRU® devices. And if your holiday gift list has a photographer, videographer, or anyone who cares about an easy way to create multiple copies of images, video files, or other important data, the CRU ToughTech® Duo is an essential gift they’ll thank you for.

I love New York (someone should create a marketing campaign around that). We were there last week
to exhibit at the PhotoPlus Expo, a gathering of photographers and vendors of all kinds. I had a chance
to walk around one afternoon and use my old iPhone (I must be in the minority of people who like smaller
devices, despite my aging eyes) to get a few images, including the iconic Chrysler building and the
headquarters of my favorite newspaper.

One of the judges for our 2014 Photo Contest, Zeb Andrews, has returned from his recent visit to southern Turkey, where he taught photography to Syrian war refugee children. He has been publishing photos and observations from his experience to his flickr site.

I found this image commentary particularly insightful with plenty of food for thought: "You look at the smile in front of you and realize on this small scale you have done this grand thing."

Zeb Andrews, a Portland photographer, and one of our judges for the 2014 CRU Photo Contest, is leaving on Thursday for a trip to Turkey. As part of the Zeitouna Project, Zeb is bringing his teaching and photography skills to teach pinhole and sunlight photography to Syrian refugee children. Zeb is one of over 30 international mentors traveling from Ireland, England, Brazil, and the United States to provide instruction and mentorship in the arts and sports to over 800 refugee children in the hopes of inspiring and healing those who have been displaced by war. We wish Zeb well and can't wait to see the results of his generosity!

I just got off the phone with past Pulitzer Prize winner and National Geographic photographer Jay Dickman, who was on the road in Dallas, presenting another in his series of digital photography workshops. Jay is a long-time fan of CRU storage devices (back to the days of the devices being sold with the WiebeTech label) and is keen to talk about the importance of backup in a photographer's digital workflow.

He agreed that it's as much or more important than the creative process itself and a lot of care and effort needs to go into ensuring that images are protected and looked after. "I'm sure I've told you this before," he said, "but storing images in a digital format is not an archival solution." What Jay is getting at is that you really need to be conscious of what you want to store, keep it catalogued, and stay on top of your disk drives. Who knows how we'll be storing and accessing these images in the future. (Side note: I was cleaning out a closet in the basement this weekend and found a stash of VCR tapes. While I still happen to have a VCR player, it won't be around forever, and I sure will not be keeping one on hand to view taped episodes of kids shows from twenty years ago.)

Jay is one of several professional photographers we're glad to call one of "ours" as he trusts his work--which in turn, is quite often that of his clients such as National Geographic--to his ToughTech Duo in the field, as well as several CRU RTX devices in his home studio.

The image of the ToughTech Duo was shot for us by Jay, on location in Antarctica.