1. If you lost your camera or phone, would anyone know how to find you?  Why not photograph a note of your phone number or email address so that some kind person can get it back to you?

Some cameras will allow you to lock a photo onto the memory card, so you don’t delete it with the rest of your pictures.

2. Another good idea is to keep notes of any allergies, medical condition, blood type, or anything else someone might need to know in an emergency.

3. Take a picture of the ingredients list for the recipe you’re planning to make before you go out to buy the goods. This would also work for projects, crafts, etc.

4. You know how you can never see what you look like when you try on new glasses? Get someone to take a picture of you and then you can.

5. Same applies to new clothes. Yes, you can see yourself in the mirror, but you often can’t see the back view and a photograph shows you much more clearly how good it all looks (or otherwise).

6. Remember last time you were in a bookshop and thought you’d get the book from the library rather than buy it? Of course you forgot the title and author by the time you got home. The answer is simple: take a snap of it. Use this idea for gifts and CDs too.

7. Seen a great hairstyle, nail design or tattoo in a window or a magazine? Make a note of it with your camera.

8. Ever lost your car in the airport car park? Photograph the letter and number of your space so you can find it easily when you get back.

9. You know the problem: you’ve seen a flyer for something interesting, or a service someone is offering, but you don’t have a pen and paper to write it down. Use your camera to make a note.

10. Sometimes you might find yourself in a bad situation: someone’s pranged your car, the parking meter is broken and you can’t buy a ticket, the fence really was broken before you went through, etc. Use your camera to take photos for the defence.

12. Just arrived and trying to find your way around a new city? Take a photo of the metro/tube/underground map so you don’t need to keep looking for one everywhere you go.

13. You can also photograph maps on your computer screen – better than carrying around scrappy bits of paper. Most cameras will allow you to zoom in for a closer view.

14. Ever taken something apart and then can’t remember how it goes together again? Take snaps of each stage in the process for reference.

15. Someone acting suspiciously round your property? A quick photo is a good insurance policy.

16. If you’re walking somewhere new and think you might not find your way back again, take photos of each turn in the road and road names and you won’t end up lost.

You can also use this idea to send people directions; I was visiting the home of a friend and hadn’t been there before – he went out on his bicycle and photographed all the junctions and roundabouts on the route and then drew arrows on them to show me which way to go. Perfect!

17. Now what sort of cable connection did you need for that new printer? Take a snap of it. Can’t remember what number of vacuum bag to get for replacements – take a snap of it. Forgotten what number of printer cartridge you need? – take a snap of it.

18. Looking for a house to buy or rent? Take photos as you’re shown round – your memory’s not as good as your camera’s.

19. Like how someone’s done up their bathroom or their bedroom? Take a picture.

20. Use it like a flashlight. If there’s a dark corner you need to see into, use the flash on your camera to light it up.

The Tate Gallery at Liverpool has an exhibition on at the moment consisting of art chosen by Marianne Faithfull.  It was all chosen because it was meaningful to her in some way, and the collection was a fascinating mixture of artists, media and styles.  One of my favourites was this little sculpture by Yoko Ono – a cluster of pyramidal prisms with a light shining through from underneath.  It produced a wonderful pattern of refracted light on the studio walls, but unfortunately the effect didn’t come out at all well in my photos – the close-ups you see here worked a whole lot better.  They remind me of the crystals on the inside of a geode.

I’m getting every so slightly panicky now; my final course assignment is due in before the end of May, and I’ve been feeling so apathetic and uninspired about my photography recently that I’ve done very little about it.  I’m supposed to be emulating the work of Ernst Haas – in particular his treatment of the elements from his book The Creation.  After getting some advice from my tutor, I’ve decided to narrow it down to water and earth, or possibly even just water.  At the moment I’m working on the assumption that I’ll be doing both and I’m looking for photos for each.  I’ve got quite a few for water already – although I do need some of a different type – but I’ve been lagging behind on the earth front.

I met up with my lovely friend Eileen on Saturday in Liverpool, and as we left the Tate Gallery down by the docks, we noticed the tide was out and the river banks had some wonderful mud patterns carved into them.  ‘What about that for earth?’, said Eileen, and so I got down to photographing them.  One of Haas’ trademarks was to play with scale by using abstraction, and in these photos I’ve tried to do that – is this a huge landscape or just some runnels in the mud?  The shapes that water leaves in mud have always fascinated me but if you’d told me years ago that I’d happily spend time taking pictures of mud, I’d have thought you were crazy.  Now I think it’s probably me who is – but in a good way.

This one is a little strange, and I’m not too sure about it yet.  Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t.

And I was playing about with this one, and solarised it for fun, then decided I rather like it this way. It’s like some weird lunar landscape – apart from the bird.  You had noticed the bird, hadn’t you?

There are issues I struggle with when it comes to photography, creativity, and art in general. They’re the kind where I seem to have totally conflicting thoughts or mixed emotions, and which continue to niggle at me like a small stone stuck in my shoe. Periodically I try metaphorically banging the shoe against the wall to loosen the stone, shaking it out, only to find when I put it back on it’s still obstinately stuck there. Recently I’ve been grappling with a load of issues centred around criticism, how it’s delivered and how to handle it.

(Warning: this is a loooong post; if you’re short on time, you can just skip to about halfway, where you’ll find some ways of dealing with criticism)

I’m going to be honest – I have quite a thin skin, and on occasions it can become positively transparent. I don’t really believe anyone who says they find it easy to take criticism, but I do seem to take it harder than most. For those of us who have a particularly difficult time with it, it’s often because we grew up in an atmosphere where we were constantly found wanting, not good enough, and not valued for ourselves even when we got things wrong. We like to think that we’re big girls and boys now, but that small vulnerable child-being is still in there and it takes things hard. What we did or said in those days was not usually separated from who we were, so that we’ve been left with the feeling that we haven’t just got something wrong, there’s something wrong with us as a person. This can feel like an attack on the very root of our being; it’s tough to handle, even when you’re all grown-up and sophisticated.  It’s not so bad when criticism’s handed out in a kind and considered way, but when it involves tactlessness, derision or dismissiveness, it can leave you quivering under the bedclothes for the next week.

I think this is particularly so in the creative fields, where our products – if they have any hope of being good – must come from our selves and what lies deep within us. Criticism really can feel like a personal attack, even when it’s not intended that way at all, and it’s not helped by the ‘toughen up’ school, who like to blame us for our over-reaction rather themselves for their heavy-handed inability to deliver something constructive. But, you know, just because we might be a little over-sensitive it doesn’t make their methods acceptable. There are too many stories of people abandoning some creative pursuit or other because they’ve been told they’re no good. Some of these have eventually bounced back and gone on to become very successful in their field. Others have given up for good, and who knows what they – or we – may have lost in the process. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for that.  Yes, we need to become a little less sensitive, but some critics need to become a little more considered.

I teach, as many of you know. I wouldn’t dream of going into a class of beginners or even intermediates, or – well anyone, really – and telling them just how terrible they are at producing a decent image without expecting them to walk out and never come back. On the contrary: I see it as my job to give them confidence, to find something in whatever they do that can be praised. I want them to go out the door full of life and motivation. This is not a bleeding heart thing: I don’t lie to them – I tell them where something falls down as well, but I’m more interested in bolstering their enthusiasm as this is what will carry them through the learning curve when things get difficult.

Criticism is generally accepted as being essential to growth and progress. If that’s the case, how can the wusses among us handle criticism, especially the difficult kind, without becoming de-motivated and discouraged? Here are some ideas I’ve found useful.

• Give yourself time to get past your first reaction: if at all possible, try to be on your own or to at least have someone there who cares about you when you receive a critique. When we get negative criticism our immediate reaction is likely to be shock – I have felt it like a kick in the stomach at times – or a deep sinking feeling in the pit of your abdomen, or some other horrible symptom that feels so physical you’d swear you’d been assaulted. You need some time to get over this.  If you have to be criticised in public – and most face-to-face art education works this way – don’t immediately react. You’ll probably feel defensive or completely cowed; either way, you won’t be in any position to assess things objectively. If you have to say anything, you can say that you find the criticism interesting and will take time to consider it. And do just that, but do it later.

• Get it out of your system: go home, cry, scream, bash a pillow and pretend it’s your tutor, eat a lot of chocolate and hit the wine bottle. Write down exactly what you’d like to do to that person in excruciating detail, how you’re feeling, how unfair life is, and how you’ll never amount to anything worthwhile and how your mother always said that was the case and, heck, she was right all along. Then do something, anything, to take your mind off it – watch a film, go swimming, lose yourself in a book, soak in a hot bath with a cool cocktail, go out with some friends (but if you do, don’t talk about it). Physical exercise is always good for getting rid of the stress hormones; walking somewhere green works well.

• You should feel a teensy bit better the next day. Probably better enough to give what’s been said some sensible consideration. First of all, is it the criticism itself that’s getting to you, or the way it was handled? Try to separate the two; it’s easy to be blinded to the merits of the first when you’re feeling angry as hell about the second.

• Ask yourself if the bad stuff was justified? Even a little? Be honest with yourself and try to take a balanced view.  If you still don’t feel it was, it might be worth seeking out some other opinions.  And keep the next few points in mind.

• Remember that not all criticism is created equal (1): you can be criticised in a way that’s hard to take, but is good and fair; you can be criticised in a way that’s hard to take and is biased; you can be criticised in ways that are simply mean and thoughtless. If you’re really lucky, you can be criticised by someone who knows how to do it: a fair evaluation of your efforts, some pointers about where it’s gone wrong, some encouragement based on what’s right with what you’ve done, finishing off with a topping of constructive ideas about how you could improve. If you’re at all sensitive, you’ll seek out the first and last of these and avoid the other two like the plague.

• Remember not all criticism is created equal (2): consider who’s doing the criticism. Do you respect them? Do you respect their work? No matter how successful or famous someone is, it doesn’t make them infallible. It doesn’t mean they’re always right about your work. It doesn’t mean they have any idea how to help you. But it doesn’t mean they don’t, either, so you need to weigh up where they’re coming from and decide how much importance to give to their opinions.

• Remember not all criticism is created equal (3): is the criticism relevant to what you’re trying to do?  I’ve written about this here, in more depth, but if the criticism comes from the buyers at IKEA but you’re doing degree level art, then it just isn’t relevant.  They’re looking for, and valuing, quite different aspects of your work.

• Make sure you understand what’s been said: go back to your critic and ask them questions – exactly what do they mean by X? What would they suggest you do to change things/improve? Can they give you some examples, other artists to look at? It’s easy for them to dole out the heavy stuff and then swan off into their effortless, sun-kissed lives – make them work a bit!  But seriously, discuss it with them.

• Try to imagine the criticism is about someone else’s work and you’re trying to get a full understanding of what the critic is actually saying, and how that person could improve on what they’ve done. Really, this is what we should be aiming for at Step 1 – it would save us a whole lot of angst if we could detach a little from it in the first place – but let’s be realistic here, it’s something we have to work up to. You can get some perspective by literally putting yourself in their place. Put two chairs opposite each other; sit in one and pretend you’re the critic, and imagine yourself sitting in the other chair. Now go over the criticism again, and see how it feels when it’s coming from you (you’re the critic now, looking at yourself over there). Do you understand better what your critic was trying to do?

• Do your best to remember that they are not your mother! Or your father, your headmistress, your Aunt Mabel, or whoever spent your entire childhood putting you down. Much of the time what your critic says is well-meant, even if it lacks something in the delivery. It’s good to remember that.

• Get some strokes from somewhere: yes, we all know that ‘wow’ comments on Flickr are pretty meaningless, but it’s still good to get them isn’t it? Seek out people who’ll be nice about your work; don’t take what they say too seriously, just use it to give yourself a temporary boost. Psychologists say for every negative we need five positives to make up for it; seek the positives wherever you can find them.  A good idea, if you’re affected badly by criticism, is to keep a folder/notebook/scrapbook of all the compliments you’ve ever had about your work or your person. Then get it out, read it, and you’ll feel a whole lot better. I promise.

• Get back in the saddle: as soon as you can, go and produce some more work.  Don’t agonise over whether or not it’s any good, just do it and do your best to have fun doing it.  If you’re on a course, give yourself a little break from the coursework and enjoy your photography (or whatever your thing is) for its own sake.  Try to remember why you took it up in the first place; it was because you enjoyed it, wasn’t it?  See if you can get that feeling back.

So, is there anything else you could add to this that might help others?  Please add it in the comments so we can all benefit!  And remember:

To escape criticism -

Do nothing, say nothing, be nothing

I don’t know what’s wrong with me at the moment; I’m just not taking many photos, and that’s not good when you’re writing a photography blog.  I think some of it might be because I don’t really know where to go in this area in terms of interesting places to take pictures.  Or maybe it’s just that I’m still feeling unsettled and the creative juices aren’t flowing quite the way I’d like them to be.  That’s probably more like it, as I’ve just spent three days in London and hardly took anything at all while I was there, and that’s pretty unusual.

It seems a good time to go through the archives and pull out some things that got passed over at the time.  Last summer I brought home this seedhead.  I don’t know the name of the plant, although it’s very common; it’s bugging me a little, so if you know what it is, can you tell me please?  I love the clear-cut spikiness of the bottom bits (I’m not good on botanical terms) and the intricacy of all the little seeds that make up the head.  I spent quite a while photographing it from every possible angle, as you can see.

I was processing these images this morning, and they weren’t coming out quite as I wanted.  They were a little too dark, but if I boosted the light tones they became too hard and contrast-y.  After a bit of experimentation, I duplicated the original layer and set the blend mode to Screen, then increased the transparency to about fifty percent.  The last one was done a little differently; with that one, I added some Gaussian blur to the duplicated layer and I didn’t increase the transparency at all.  It’s given a very soft, high-key effect that I’m quite pleased with.  All were taken using the Lensbaby – by default, as I don’t have anything else that will do macro.

A couple of years ago we went to Sao Miguel island in the Azores. The Azores had fascinated me ever since I heard about them; most people have no idea where they are and neither did I till I went there.  (Just to fill you in, they’re a small archepelago of islands right in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, roughly level with Lisbon in Portugal)  They’re volcanic islands, and there’s still a lot of geothermal activity going on, with thermal springs, bubbling hot mud, and the sort of thing you’d generally expect to find in Iceland.   In fact, that was a large part of their appeal to me – Icelandic geology but with sunshine and warmth instead of cold and rain.  They’re also a prime whale-watching site, but we never did see any of those.

There’s some stunning scenery there, but two things were working against me at the time.  One was that I was feeling very uninspired and disillusioned with photography in general, and landscape photography in particular; I’d just started my Landscape course and I knew I wasn’t interested in taking the kind of standard landscape shots that I thought it required.  Over time I realised I could interpret the brief much more freely than I’d thought, but that’s another story.

The second thing was that roads on Sao Miguel are narrow and there is only one main road that rings the island.  You can’t just stop anywhere you feel like it, so you’re forced to drive past lots of – what were to me – very interesting shots.  To accommodate tourists, stopping places have been created wherever there are ‘views’.  You stop, you get out your car, you stand in the designated place, and you take your shot.  To me, this feels like painting by numbers.  You end up with a very nice shot, but it’s identical to the ones on the postcards in the tourist shops and so I think you might as well save yourself the trouble and buy a postcard.  I couldn’t find any way of getting my own vision into these shots and I got very bored with taking them.  So bored that they’ve mostly been lying on my hard-drive for the last two years without seeing the light of day.

As our stay went on, I dutifully shot the prescribed views but I also started looking for other, often smaller, things that interested me.  I took some ‘view’ shots that weren’t from prescribed places on bright sunny days and liked these a bit better.

And then I became fascinated by all the little thermal springs and wells that we found everywhere we went; some of these had quite astounding colours formed by the sediment left by the minerals in the water.

I was also drawn to taking small detail shots; the distinctive roofs and tiles, windows, wildlife, and the wonderful light and shade caused by the strong, hot sun.  By this time I was enjoying my photography a whole lot more.

What I remember when I look at these is the push/pull I felt between taking photos that ‘explain’ the place to people who haven’t been there, and taking these pictures of small details that say ‘Azores’ to me when I look at them but would mean nothing to most folk.  These shots could work for someone who’d been there, and in fact might be quite effective in that case, but would be pretty useless for a tourist brochure or to give someone an impression of the place.

This is more of an issue with somewhere like the Azores because most people have little or no knowledge of the place.  If you take a very well-known tourist destination – let’s say London – people all over the world are familiar with the major sights and icons, so shooting small and quirky details only expands on that knowledge.  However, if you want to communicate to people what the Azores are like, you really do need to concentrate on the ‘tourist’ pictures that I found so boring to take.  I like all of these shots much better looking at them now than I did then and wonder why I was so ready to dismiss them at the time.  I know I was bored and uninterested taking the ‘postcard’ shots, and felt much more inspired and involved when taking the detail ones; these seem more ‘me’ somehow.

I guess the question is who you take the shots for, and why. I think I was trying to do two things at once: take photos I could show to friends and family to let them see what the place is like, and take photos that I enjoyed taking and were very personal to me, but which wouldn’t function as ‘tourist’ pictures.

This rather startling magenta pink is the result of using infrared surveillance film to take ordinary photos. It’s the work of someone called Richard Mosse, and yesterday I was at a study day in which we saw two exhibitions that concerned themselves with the subject of war and genocide. This isn’t my usual cup of tea when it comes to photography; I don’t really need it pointed out to me that there’s a lot of misery out there in the world and I’d prefer to be reminded about the better qualities of humankind – it’s easy to forget about those.

But anyway, that’s what we went to see. Thing is, these images left me untouched and decidedly bored, which is not (I’m fairly sure) the effect they were supposed to have. Other people seemed to be getting a lot out of them, but after five minutes I was standing there wondering when the coffee was coming. We had a little discussion over the coffee when we eventually got some, and after some mild internal panic about whether or not I could think of anything sensible to say, I managed to pull something out of the hat. In case you’re interested, it went like this: the predominant pink colour is Barbie pink and reminds you of girls, and dolls, and toys and Walt Disney, and as this is so very opposite to the masculine world of war depicted in the images, it sets up a certain visual tension. I knew my philosophy degree would come in useful some day.

But you know, I don’t really think this; I don’t think these photos worked. Certainly not for me. I felt nothing looking at them, nothing at all, except a desire to move on to something more interesting. Janet made a good point over the coffee table – ‘why’, she said, ‘is this pink colour not just a gimmick? If we submitted something like this for an assignment, we’d get hammered and accused of just that.’ Gareth looked thoughtful. ‘Well’, he said carefully, ‘Richard Mosse is an established and famous photographer and doesn’t have to explain himself; you’re just a student.’ Those weren’t his words, you understand, and he’s considerably better at being tactful than this would suggest, but that was the gist. ‘And it’s not really a gimmick’, he went on, ‘because he’s making a point by using film that played a role in the conflict itself’. Ok, there’s a bit of cleverness there, I guess – but only a bit.

Upstairs was another exhibition by Simon Norfolk, called For Most of It I Have No Words – brilliant title. He was looking at various sites throughout the world where genocide had taken place, and photographing the traces left there. These images were stunning in themselves, but more than that, they made me feel something. One that touched me was a simple image of some stone steps, with the light coming down from above and highlighting the indentations in the steps made by thousands of feet over time. So what, you might think, until you read the caption and understood that these were prison steps at Auschwitz. Photographically, you’re at the bottom of the steps looking up; standing in darkness and seeing light above, but the tragedy is that you may move up into that light never to come down again. The history of the place is held in the stone of the steps, and it’s very moving.

Auschwitz: staircase in a prison block by Simon Norfolk

I’m hopelessly biased, I know. I’ve said before that I need an image to be visually satisfying in order to pull me in. This is something so fundamental to me that I know I’m never going to change in this respect, no matter how much art education I’m subjected to. I loved Simon Norfolk’s photos, loved them. I thought they were beautiful in themselves, and profoundly moving when read in conjunction with the captions. They’re quite old now, in art terms, and are much ‘safer’ than the Mosse images. I’m aware of this, and I like to be challenged, and I’ll do my best to appreciate something that doesn’t have immediate appeal. But Norfolk’s photos are what I relate to; they make me feel something while Mosse’s left me unmoved. Mosse’s had shock value and I sometimes think that a lot of modern art relies on this for any effect it has. Norfolk’s were quieter, subtler, and to my mind all the more powerful for that.  ‘Ah well’, said Fiona as we walked out, ‘it’d be a boring world if we all thought the same.’  And so it would.

Both Richard Mosse and Simon Norfolk are on exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool, until 10th June.

One of the delights of my day is to read the daily poem that’s delivered to my inbox.  Samantha Reynolds at bentlily.com somehow manages not just to write a poem a day, but to write a good poem a day.  How does she do that?  Not everyone’s into poetry, I know, but hers are very accessible and always manage to say something that makes you think or smile.  And they’re short – always a plus point in a poem, even of the best kind. This one is about taking photographs.  Let’s read and discuss:

Why I took so few photos

He stands pressed against the window
naked except for a pair of red mittens
pointing to the crows
flapping his arms
and repeating over and over

duck
duck.

I think several things simultaneously

he is perfect
I wonder when he will learn a word other than duck
people can probably see him from the park

then as I so often do
I think to get my camera
but don’t

and when he asks later
why there aren’t more photos of him
I will tell him how moments are like bubbles
you have to stay very still
or they will burst.

I sometimes think that while photography opens your eyes to the world and makes you see it better and appreciate it more, sometimes it can stop you being fully in the experience.  Occasionally I put my camera down and simply take in the moment, before it bursts like a bubble – but perhaps not often enough.  Do you?