Whilst doodling around on the internet the other day I was looking at a few reels on Instagram. Now it probably won’t come as much of a surprise that that my Instagram feed is filled up with great photographers and so it will equally make sense that the all-powerful algorithm serves me up photography related content most of the time. One of the reels was from a relatively young and relatively inexperienced photographer proclaiming that he had discovered a new technique. It went on to show a technique that is, to me, as old as the hills. Dragging the shutter to create a deliberate blur.

I was just about to type something that gently and constructively pointed out that this wasn’t anything new and that an old hand like me rarely (if ever) sees anything that’s truly new when I decided to see what other viewers of the reel had commented first. Sure enough, there was a small number of constructive and supportive comments but the vast majority of them were not even remotely constructive and way too many were downright dismissive. I breathed a huge sigh of relief that I hadn’t been that person – the one who sought to boost their own sense of self-importance by squashing the joy and enthusiasm of someone who had discovered a potentially exciting technique that was new to them.

I went on to imagine how I would have felt when I was posting technique examples on my website twenty-five or more years ago if some older and “wiser” photographers had pointed out that they had been doing the same things many years before me. I’d have been upset, embarrassed and would have experienced a few other emotions too – none of which would have helped my career or my craft.

Fast forward to the latter stages of the year 2025 and my never-ending need to try new things with lights, cameras, lenses and even (say this in hushed tones) editing techniques. When the budget allows, I’ll buy a new light modifier to see how that makes me change things up. When time allows on jobs I still love to shoot the personal frames at the end of the session. When I get an urge to try something that I’ve either imagined or seen someone else do I will even do that.

Recently I have been shooting a whole series of portraits for a project that a client has been running talking about migration. The subjects had all ended-up in the same area and most had moved their lives half-way across the world to establish a different (and hopefully better) way of living and working. The format has tended to be that I shoot portraits to fit the brief and layout for up to twenty minutes and then the video team takes over and I can pack up. What I have taken to doing is to float around in the background with my mirrorless cameras set to silent shooting and grab some interview frames. There’s nothing new for me to shoot during an interview but I’ve never been able to easily do it whilst the subject was being filmed and I’m pretty sure that I never did it on a 100-500mm lens at or near the super-telephoto end before. It’s early days and I’m still honing the technique but I’m pretty sure that the day will come when I get it right.

So what else is new? I’ve been shooting a lot with a compact camera – right up to the sort of ISO where every frame needs to have some sort of denoise applied. I’ve written about playing with the various AI and non-AI noise reduction tools before. What’s changed is that Adobe Camera RAW and the AI denoise that it includes has become reliable and appears to have stopped deleting details that it thinks might be noise. I’m still not using anything on editorial jobs but some of the corporate stuff and quite a bit of my personal work is getting the treatment and exactly what, where and when the treatment is applied is something I have learned in large part from shooting with the tiny and fun Canon G5X MkII that has been a regular companion for a couple of years now.

Having witnessed just how much negative comment a young photographer was subjected to has given me yet more reason to be thankful that I was learning back in the days when it was not deemed OK to put others down for trying their best and for celebrating finding new ways to do this amazing job. I want to pay tribute to the amazing photographers who looked at my work in the darkrooms we shared and hung around outside of and gave constructive criticism, encouragement and the very occasional nugget of praise.

In particular I wanted to mention my dear friend and colleague Brian Harris who died last month. He was one of the very best photographers of both his genre and generation. He was twelve years older than me but from our first conversation about two years into my career he was a constant source of advice, gentle criticism and enormously welcome encouragement. I’m a long way from being the only one that he helped in his fifty year career and when I have helped those coming into the profession with and behind me I have tried to do what Brian did – be nice, be helpful and never presume that we had all of the answers. So thank you Brian. Thank you for, yet again, stopping me doing something wrong. Your words of wisdom and example will live on.

If you’d like to read one of the very many obituaries written about Brian Harris and his career you can either do a search for them or just visit The BPPA website.

If you see someone getting joy from their photography then please, please think about the line from the Disney movie Bambi where my hero from early childhood Thumper says “If you can’t say something nice… don’t say nothing at all.” The giving and receiving of constructive criticism has been a great joy to me and I hope that others feel exactly the same way.