By the time I was a teenager I had received enough sports coaching (football and cricket) that I was pretty hardened to being told I was doing something wrong and just the tiniest bit embarrassed and surprised by those rare moments when they told me I’d done well. I will be celebrating my fortieth anniversary as a working photographer later this year. I left college at the age of 22 in the early summer of 1986 and started working for a magazine publisher about two months later. I can’t claim to remember every time my work was picked out for praise but I can remember each and every time it was singled out for being sub-standard, off-brief or just not quite right. Back in the early days criticism, positive or negative, made a huge difference and I’d say that those sports coaches did a good job of helping to prepare me for this career.

I wish that I could remember which of the many dozens (or even hundreds) of authors that I have photographed who said it to a reporter as I sat through another interview but I have never forgotten their words “criticism is the lifeblood of the author”. I’m going to water that down quite a bit and say “feedback is very helpful to the photographer”.

Just recently positive comments have been like the proverbial London bus – nothing for ages and then three come along all at once. There haven’t been any complaints but I have been lucky enough to receive three extremely positive comments about me and my work.

I don’t mean to sound boastful here but it has taken me by surprise and, I have to admit, made me happy. Three jobs and three comments. One was an editorial portrait where I had to match the style of another photographer who shot the other portrait for the spread some 3,246 miles or 5,224 kilometres away. It was a client that I hadn’t spoken to in quite a while and the Photo Editor came back with “Perfect, you nailed it. Thank you”. Normally a man of few words, this by comparison was fulsome praise.

The second one was also a portrait for a B2B (business-to-business) magazine publisher. I carry out about half a dozen assignments a year for them and the feedback from the Commissioning Editor was very short and to the point “fantastic portrait, it wasn’t the cover story but it is now”. This was from someone who once told me that I’d only hear from them if I had messed up and was being asked to re-shoot (which, touch wood, hasn’t happened in the twelve or so years I have been working for them).

The hat-trick was somewhat different. It was a set of business portraits (we used to call the them headshots) which I shot as a sub-contractor for another photographer. He supplied examples, set the boundaries for the job and I pitched-up at the client’s beautiful London offices weighed down with kit and ready to flatter. Sixteen people later, one of the senior people who worked for the company came and found me, shook my hand and thanked me for “putting absolutely everyone at ease and getting some first class headshots”. This was followed up with a very complimentary email from the photographer who had sent me there.

It’s great to get positive feedback in a world where the general rule appears to be “no news is good news”. The whole experience got me back to thinking about client interaction and that (the lack of) it is one thing that I miss from my early days in this industry I’ve written before about the fact that I have never met most of my regular clients face-to-face or IRL as the current phrase “in real life” goes. These were three people who I have spoken to and even met and I wondered whether that made a difference.

There’s something special about another photographer praising your work, of that there’s no doubt. Whether it’s even better to get positive comments from the client I’m not sure but I’ll definitely take either with a big smile.