1. If you like a piece of work, say so.
2. Don’t, however, use the word “but.” “I like it but I wish…” is just a bait-and-switch from complement to criticism. Hearing that someone likes your work sucks you in; the sucker punch of the “but” is an unpleasant one.
3. If you don’t like a piece of work and you haven’t been asked by its author to give a critique, keep your mouth shut. If people wanted your critique, they would have asked.
4. When you’re giving a critique, be honest – brutal if that’s what honesty leads to – but don’t be mean. Critique the work, not the artist.

I guess this boils down to Wheaton’s Law, but I thought it was worth saying anyway.

I think I’ve found a methodology that would work for it… A very complex, painstaking one that would mean many, many hours of shooting and post-processing for each image.

Actually, I quite like the sound of that.

A few people have asked what kind of images I want to produce now. Well, the one above is a good place to start. It’s not about clothes, it’s about the person. It’s also about the experience of being freezing cold on a summer’s evening for the sake of a test shoot.

Gradually getting to work on stripping my book back to where I want it to be; there’s going to be a certain amount of rebuilding to do, but that’s okay. Probably about time that this place got a spring clean and a re-theming, too, come to think of it.

Oh, and according to WordPress, this is my 1,000th published post on this blog. Hurrah.

© 2009 Century Photographic; used with permission

2011 has been an amazing year in many respects, but in many ways the only reason it’s been as good as it has is because I’ve had my wife of two years (today) by my side for all of it.

Sarah understands me better than anyone on the planet. She can coax me out of my sulks, help me through my occasional depressions and inspires me to shoot for the stars every time I try something new. She’s an amazing woman, and I’m so very lucky to have her.

Travel

I love travelling. I love exploring new places and meeting new people. Now that, for various reasons, I won’t be travelling as much for my day job as I have in years past, I want to make up for it by travelling more for my own reasons. Even if that just means going to new places within Blighty, or going to places that I’ve been before and to which I’m longing to return.

I have the perfect travel partner, too – my wife, Sarah. And I’d love for us to go out and travel and shoot some cool images together on the way, like we did in California this April gone past.

World Trade Center by Joshua Schwimmer, on Flickr, CC-BY-ND

This time ten years ago, we were sat in the lounge of our old house, waiting for the time to tick by so that we could go to our new GP for our initial check-ups. Sarah was feeling ill that day, I remember.

The TV was on. Some meaningless soap or other  - Doctors, perhaps – was just finishing. The screen flickered, changed to an image of two huge towers. One of them was burning.

It took a few seconds for the news anchor to start speaking; until that point we thought we were watching a trailer for some disaster movie or other.

Ten years on, then. How the world has changed, and in many ways not for the better. Everything’s that little bit less nice, that bit less kind than it used to be. I don’t see that trend reversing itself any time soon, but I’m no futurist; maybe I’ll be wrong.

I don’t really have any right to go on about how the day affected me. It did so in a tangential, detached way; I was lucky enough to not know anyone in or around any of the buildings that were attacked. Today, my thoughts are with the people who lost loved ones and with the people who survived. I don’t think any of the survivors would claim to have come out unscathed; I know many are still battling with the physical and mental scars to this day, and may well do so for the rest of their lives.

There you are: no profundities today; just a summary of my state of mind.

Anyway, I was rather tickled to find, whilst idly browsing on SFO’s wifi, not one but two comments by someone calling themselves – imaginatively – “anon”, both of which took the time to tell me how terrible certain of my photographs are.

I don’t allow anonymous commenting on this blog, and comments like this are why. Whilst I value anonymity on the Internet I think that you should have the courage to put your name to artistic critiques of others’ work. To do otherwise seems cowardly to me.

But it occurs to me that these comments are actually a success of sorts. I’ve annoyed someone enough for them to try to give me bit of a kicking, and that means I must be doing something right at least.

So thanks, anon. I don’t care about you or your opinions but I am pleased to say that you’ve brightened up my day.

Once again, I’m moved to think – and blog – by something (actually two things) that Chase Jarvis has written.

It’s that time of year when, with a new tax year starting, you have to think about your priorities for the next 12 months. Okay, you always have to think about those, but it seems like the ideal opportunity to consider starting up new lines of business.

For a while now I’ve been thinking about starting up a small company, separate from my main photographic concerns, through which I can work with one of the larger markets that’s available to me up here in North West Lancashire: social and family portraiture. I’ve no doubt that there’s a market there and that I could sell to it and that it would probably result in a decent return for me.

And on Wednesday evening, whilst toying with WordPress themes for the website that I was planning to set up for that little business, I realised something: I don’t actually really want to do it. Not right now, anyway.

The truth is – and it’s one of those truths that I should have realised sooner but didn’t, goodness knows why – that social photography doesn’t excite me. It’s not that it’s something that’s beyond my abilities, not at all; I get on with pretty much everyone and I enjoy shooting family portraits to a certain extent, but I can’t imagine, right now at least, getting up out of bed in the morning and being excited about shooting family pictures. That’s not to say that I won’t do it if asked – that would be foolish – or that I think it’s beneath me or any such nonsense. Far from it.

In fact I want to go out of my way here to make it clear that I’m not saying that I look down on that kind of work or that I don’t respect the people who do it. I have oodles of respect for them. It’s a job that takes time and dedication and lots and lots of hours to make sure that you’re doing the best you can for your clients. And that’s exactly why I don’t want to do it right now.

I have my own focus, and it’s in a more conceptual, fuzzily-defined space than social portraiture. If I don’t have a laser focus, if I don’t dedicate myself absolutely to being the best at what’s in my head and in my heart right now, then I’m just going to be mediocre, and that’s not good enough.