tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-78222035942894120162012-01-14T08:04:49.657-05:00Photography, Teaching and the Creative LifeRandall Armorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17310369803510428464noreply@blogger.comBlogger151100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7822203594289412016.post-6227145838177383192008-07-08T16:08:00.012-04:002008-07-22T15:22:35.439-04:00

A few weeks from today will mark the fourth anniversary of the death of my friend Chikako Atsuta. Had she maybe taken a moment longer to leave for work on that brilliant August morning in 2004, Ako would have simply been 39 years and 202 days old. Instead, she perished beneath the wheels of a lumber truck on a city street while riding her bike to work, and those precious few years and days were

Randall Armorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17310369803510428464noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7822203594289412016.post-18996969621082481092008-07-07T11:01:00.009-04:002008-07-22T15:15:42.023-04:00

I just finished my third album cover for singer/songwriter Al Stewart, a design project that was very close to my heart. I usually tell some version of this story when I am introducing myself to new classes at CDIA, so I thought it might be a good idea to post it here. This piece was originally written for my friend Neville Judd’s website. Neville wrote Al’s official biography Al Stewart: The

Randall Armorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17310369803510428464noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7822203594289412016.post-68328367347673743142008-04-09T08:01:00.011-04:002008-05-29T13:33:58.487-04:00

For the vast majority of young heterosexual men who set off in search of a career in photography (or at least for those of us who are honest about our ridiculous self-delusions) its siren song is often the real or metaphorical promise of “fast cars and naked women”. In the absence of more high-brow and imaginative motivators, I’m thinking “Blowup” and “Austin Powers” here, but for those of you

Randall Armorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17310369803510428464noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7822203594289412016.post-6109855627016715662008-01-08T15:12:00.001-05:002008-01-08T20:06:09.637-05:00

I was asked to do a live digital photography demo at CDIA’s Open House last week. I was obviously flattered, but I also couldn’t help wondering why they would ask me, the new guy, to represent and encapsulate the entire program in a concise 15 minute show-and tell. I mentioned it to my friend and colleague Tim Lynch, and he said something like “I used to do them, but….” His voice trailed off and

Randall Armorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17310369803510428464noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7822203594289412016.post-49277267665822337832007-12-17T14:50:00.001-05:002008-01-09T11:38:16.839-05:00

The school where I teach digital photography urges its instructors to remind our students that “Photoshop is not a verb.” I do, and everyone always laughs and then we talk about what the point of the statement is, about how important it still is to learn lighting and exposure and composition and cropping images in the camera and blah, blah, blah. In order to further encourage them to learn the

Randall Armorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17310369803510428464noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7822203594289412016.post-75499633643030191532007-10-19T19:38:00.001-04:002007-10-19T19:50:39.042-04:00

When I left the freelance world and took a job as a catalog photographer at Filenes in 1995, I made a sign for the top of my computer cart that said “Just an analog guy trapped in a digital world”. It stayed there until a bright August day 11 years later when the merger with Macy’s shut the place down forever. My sign started out as a smug statement of defiance and skepticism toward the intrusion

Randall Armorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17310369803510428464noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7822203594289412016.post-57208296577830089492007-10-03T16:04:00.000-04:002007-11-13T10:28:05.272-05:00

I showed Jenny my Leica the other day. It’s a modern M6, but other than some cosmetic changes and refinements, it’s essentially the same camera that many photographers have relied on for well over 50 years. She looked at it, held it in her hands, and acknowledged its substantial heft, obvious quality and sheer coolness. She raised it to her right eye, worked the aperture, the focus tab, and the

Randall Armorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17310369803510428464noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7822203594289412016.post-38597700369734942022007-07-24T08:53:00.001-04:002007-07-24T12:33:44.110-04:00

“Ya wanna see Edgerton’s lab?”I had to chuckle at the way the question was posed, under her breath casually as if she had flashed the inside of her raincoat and said “Ya wanna buy a Rolex cheap?” But coming from Cheryl Vossmer, one of my students at New England School of Photography and a sergeant with the MIT Police Department, I knew those few words were ripe with possibility. Asking a

Randall Armorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17310369803510428464noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7822203594289412016.post-84024332743695530362007-07-12T15:36:00.000-04:002007-09-11T15:18:51.126-04:00

I’ve learned a thing or two about ambition in my life. It lives in each of us to varying degrees, and each of us do different things because of it. And then it does different things right back to us. Take me, for instance. Or better yet, take Jimmy Carter, Jessica Savitch, or a guy I used to know named Charley. Ambition led all of us to be at the intersection of 8th and Walnut Streets in

Randall Armorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17310369803510428464noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7822203594289412016.post-65934119431797133682007-07-04T21:42:00.000-04:002007-10-19T14:08:32.100-04:00

I wrote this essay in July 2001, during a period of great turmoil and introspection in my personal life. It predated our greater national turmoil and introspection by about 2 months, but recounts an experience that has unfortunately become far too common for photographers in the years since.---A month or so before the world changed I decided to spend a perfect summer evening down the Jersey Shore

Randall Armorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17310369803510428464noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7822203594289412016.post-9829471860721510502007-06-27T19:07:00.000-04:002007-07-26T16:03:28.407-04:00

Those of us of a certain age remember what it used to be like to buy and own a pair of blue jeans. They came in mostly one color (“blue”), one style (“jeans”), and one somewhat undesirable cut other than “regular” (“husky”). Worn right off of the rack, they appeared to be made of some sort of ballistic cotton that could stop a small-caliber rifle round, and were so stiff that we couldn’t bend our

Randall Armorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17310369803510428464noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7822203594289412016.post-23283844321517619932007-06-26T17:22:00.001-04:002007-08-31T12:55:02.505-04:00

Here’s a story about three pictures, the two above that I did take, and the one I’ll tell you about in a second that I didn’t but that I’ll try to show you anyway. I’ve always thought that, at its core, photography as practiced by me and by those whose work I admire most is simply about being able to show people things I’ve seen, and if I'm really successful, maybe a bit about how I felt about

Randall Armorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17310369803510428464noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7822203594289412016.post-39859826361620254152007-06-23T19:19:00.001-04:002007-08-31T13:01:05.470-04:00

Not all that many years ago, my ex-wife and I made one of our many trips to Holland to spend Christmas with her mother, sister and brother-in-law Gerard and their new baby. The whole lot of us then jetted off to Nice for a weekend (not quite the European equivalent of a $69 round-trip special from Boston to Orlando, but close). Once there we decided to head up the coast to Monte Carlo for an

Randall Armorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17310369803510428464noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7822203594289412016.post-22981394360893268832007-06-21T12:41:00.000-04:002007-07-10T09:12:22.616-04:00

My pal and colleague at NESOP, Heratch Ekmekjian, took me out for breakfast at the Deluxe Town Diner in Watertown yesterday. We pulled into a spot on the street, he turned off the engine, and the automatic door locks engaged. I made an exaggerated attempt to get out of the car by pulling on the handle rapidly and repeatedly, and, seeing that this didn’t seem to bother him much, I upped the ante a

Randall Armorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17310369803510428464noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7822203594289412016.post-38871759118865912862007-06-19T23:08:00.000-04:002007-06-26T18:08:13.866-04:00

You’ve landed on Amalgamated Idiosyncrasies and Intangibles, my blog about photography, the creative life, and whatever else happens to pop into my head at any given moment. I have a lot of stories to tell, and I hope to bring some of them to life here.I teach an “Advanced Digital Camera” (ADC) workshop at New England School of Photography (NESOP) in Boston. I am also about to start a gig

Randall Armorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17310369803510428464noreply@blogger.com0