Obviously I'm more than a little confused, so no big surprise I jumped around a bit. 
The thing was that the instructor at the workshop apparently thought some of my images were good enough to save as RAW for some future date.... if or when I manage to learn some editing skills. In the meantime RAW images could eat up all kinds of space, so it seemed the logical thing to do was to store them to an external drive.
When I tried to export the RAW images, iPhoto converted them to JPG. Not finding a setting to tell iPhoto how I want the files handled, I assumed the fault was with iPhoto and was hoping that perhaps Lightroom would let me move the RAW files as RAW files.
Rob's response:
Note: in *all* raw processors, raws must be exported as (or saved as) jpegs (or tiff) for external consumption.
sounds like it somehow isn't possible to move a raw file without it being converted. Is that really possible?
