A few days ago I was at an event in Manchester run by Canon UK. While I was chatting with one of the many talented young photographers that they had invited I remembered something about my early career that I am pretty sure helped me more than I could have known at the time.

In the later 1980s and early 1990s I had a light grey Domke F1X camera bag. I loved that bag and I loved working from it. I also loved that every time I lifted the top flap there were two words written there with a marker pen:

• Juxtapose
• Exaggerate

They were written there because the legendary photographer Terence Donovan gave a talk at my college in either 1985 or 1986. When asked by one of my classmates about taking better pictures, he explained that by juxtaposing our subjects with backgrounds, secondary subjects and other compositional elements we could give our pictures a depth that told stories more effectively. By exaggerating things such as light, angles, perspective or even the contents of our images we could, again, tell those stories in different and possibly better ways. I scribbled down those two words in my almost brand new Filofax, underlining both multiple times.

I have never forgotten what he said. I have altered my interpretation a bit over the years but those two words lived on the inside of my favourite camera bag until it became unusable (it never fell to pieces, it just ended up getting painted by a five year old whilst I was busy photographing a school art lesson and I never got the luminous pink and orange colours out of it).

The conversation that made me remember that bag and just how much what was written on the inside of it had meant to my early career development made me feel rather nostalgic. If I have an idea these days I will probably type something in Apple Notes on my phone which can never be as impactful as having two words writ large in marker pen.

When, after several washes, my grey Domke was still salmon pink I sold it cheaply to another photographer when she also bought a 35mm Nikon lens from me. I cannot remember her name for the life of me but I hope that she understood the concepts of juxtaposition and exaggeration and that they helped her become a better photographer.

Juxtaposition is what I mostly think about when imagining and then composing pictures. If it’s a simple picture then it’s all about where the point of interest and focus sits in the frame but as soon as something else becomes part of the picture then how the different elements relate to one another takes equal billing.

In order to fulfil the exaggerate part of the twin concepts then I make sure that empty spaces are really empty, crowded ones really crowded and that all angles, lines, shadows and bold colours are emphasised and made to work hard to help with the storytelling. Rocket science it isn’t but having these two words on my mind for so many years has helped to make my pictures more interesting, more related to the story and generally better.

Back in 2014 I posted a “photographic word of the day” or #PWOTD every day on Twitter for a while. I’ve just checked back and I didn’t include exaggeration even though juxtaposition was in the list. No idea why.