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REASONS BEHIND
THE IMAGE
Colin Armitstead
has been our General Secretary for over 40 years and leads our
Assignments outings to many and varied locations, with follow
up sessions where prints are shown and discussed. One of our
most popular and successful activities, the Assignments
initiative won Colin the Vice President award in 2011. Colin
is also an Honorary Life Vice President of the Society.
“One of our
assignments days was spent in South Shields last July. I was
aware that there was a “Fun Fair” on the jetty and I hoped
this could yield some different pictures.
From an early
age I had been mesmerized by the penny in the slot machines as
my few available pennies had a habit of rapidly disappearing.
I was not ready for the rapid changes in these since my
childhood. Garish lighting, colourful images and psychology
were there to tempt you to feed the beast. After looking round
the myriad of possibles I settled on the one you see. Of
course I titled the image “Temptation”
Taken on my
Lumix FZ7 the first thing was to set on Aperture metering and
open up to allow a reasonably fast shutter speed to match the
interior lighting (this is normally the only manual
adjustment I make prior to shooting). As my viewfinder does
not record the true image frame I leave a small amount round
the image to make sure I get what I want in the end. My aim is
to always fill the frame with my intended picture.
So here we see
the clown catching the eye, to make us choose this machine. He
eyes the large Winners Slot with its undefined prize. Almost
hidden at the bottom of the frame are the three slots designed
to milk you of all your cash. To cap it all, the small clown
on the right is laughing his hat off as you are indeed
TEMPTED. Not a picture for judges, one to look at and try to
see why I took the shot.
As a true
Yorkshire born man my total contribution to the whole thing
was only this shot (money buys printing paper)”
Colin Armitstead
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