I recently had the pleasure of talking with Bob Sacha from MediaStorm (www.mediastorm.org) about the state of the photography industry, where it is going and how photographers can differentiate themselves from the pack - the pack which is getting huge these days with new photographers turning pro everyday. Bob was teaching a workshop here in Santa Fe, New Mexico on creating SoundSlide presentations (http://www.soundslides.com) in a similar manner those that MediaStorm has been creating for years.

If you have never heard of MediaStorm.org, I would highly recommend that you check out their fantastic site. They have pretty much paved the way for a whole new type of photojournalism using sound and still images to communicate intense and relevant stories. At nearly ever newspaper across the United States photographers are starting to produce SoundSlides presentations for the web. A great example of this is Paula Lerner's The Women of Kabul series that was produced for the Washington Post.

So how does all of this tie into Lightroom? In our conversation, Bob and I were talking about how Lightroom made the digital world so much easier. We talked about how Lightroom is the leading tool for photographers to work with their images and how incredible it would be if SoundSlides could be integrated into Lightroom as a plug in or in some other manner. I'd never really thought about it as I have never done a SoundSlides presentation myself (yet!) but it made a lot of sense to have it integrated in Lightroom. I applaud Lightroom for the extensive number of web gallery options available. And in particular I have made extensive use of SlideShowPro, which is a plug for the Lightroom Web module. How incredible would it be if we could use SoundSlides as a plug in for Lightroom? It seems like a logical progression as Lightroom continues to grow and dominate the photography workflow world.

With all that is going on in photojournalism and hard times being felt at most newspapers around the world, it is exciting to see this new form of journalism gaining ground. Also, as an FYI for those of you that make your living as a photographer, Vincent Laforet recently wrote an incredible article entitled The Cloud is Falling over on Sportsshooter.com. If you make your living from photography I highly recommend you give it a read. He talks about the changing face of journalism and the new realities we are facing as a profession. It is time to think creatively more than ever before and our workflow - and the options we have within our workflow - will play a central role in surviving an already tough profession.

That's it for this week. See you next week here at Inside Lightroom.

Adios, Michael Clark