Picture Editor; not a real job, is it? Paid to study snaps! How hard can it be? It’s not as if you’re run ragged in Casualty, or toiling down a coal mine.

I agree wholeheartedly. Even so, life as a Picture Editor is far more stressful than you might imagine. After a certain number of hours at the helm of the picture desk, I may even start swearing to myself, at least I think and hope it’s to myself.

A soft, steady rhythm, fuck, Fuck, FUCK, the sound of expletives uttered under my breath growing louder until I start sounding like some spluttering, sweary seagull outboard motor.

Of course, you dream of truly letting off steam, which in its way is a release valve, yet the stress of avoiding the rocks has one urging to really vent, like some exasperated ship’s foghorn.

Then it happens, along comes an image that pushes you too far and makes you want to explode like Mr Creosote from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.

So, at the risk of sounding like an angry old man, which is precisely what I am, I need to get this off my chest before I detonate, frightening the newsdesk and covering features in gore.

Now, it’s often been said that you can’t polish a turd; even so, that’s not stopped many a charlatan from making a nice little earner by rolling them in glitter.

Nowadays, it would seem that instead of bling, we are at the mercy of the latest gimmick, as a new panacea has become the latest comprehensive solution to an age-old problem, a massive lack of fucking talent.

I really have lost count of the number of times that, after spending hours hassling, schmoozing, pleading, sometimes begging, mostly hoping in vain that a PR agency or company will send that image, only to curse with a word that rhymes with PHUT on opening the email when it eventually arrives.

Phut this, phut that, it’s always the phutting same. Aside from being the size of a fucking postage stamp, for Christ’s sake, when will people realise that web and print use are not the same? Araghhhhhhhhhhhhh.

No. It’s even worse than that.

You see, a fad has sprung forth among PR agencies, a trend set at the corporate HQs of the trendy young things that issue such images from exalted heights like Papal commands. And that craze is this, rather than send out a nicely composed, nicely exposed, and nicely thought-out portrait or photo.

Now, you can send out any old shite, all you have to do is make it monochrome.

Now, some folks can carry a tune, others bring us to tears, and some may even make us cry for the right reasons. It’s the same with photography, especially black and white.

Its creation is a true art, one that in the right hands will have the spine tingling with as much frequency as Meat Loaf battering out “Bat Out of Hell” or Ian Curtis electrifying you with “Love Will Tear Us Apart”.

That’s because black and white is not black and white. It’s not easy; its creativity inhabits the world of shades of grey. It’s simply not as simple as taking a colour file and changing its mode. To the visually tone-deaf, that fundamental lack of understanding is why we suffer so many fucking bum notes.

Consequently, opening an email is like pulling a creative cracker. Instead of the anticipation of discovering it holds a brilliant blast of visual inspiration, too often it’s a damp squib, inside, nothing but mediocrity, invariably in monochrome, no jokes, and it’s not funny.

So, come on, PR world, I’ve got news for you and the rest of your monochrome set. Believe me, taking a shit photo and making it black and white will not make it better. Honestly, it won’t.

Here is some free advice, earned from over forty years at the coal face, no amount of filter fuckery can compensate for a lack of fucking talent.

So, just in case you didn’t get the message, here it is in black and white. Converting an image to greyscale is not like running it through some Photoshop Cartier-Bresson filter.

You can’t just dial in Eamonn McCabe, Brian Harris, James Nachtwey, Ian Berry, or Tom Stoddart like it’s some special effect. It’s both naive and disrespectful. So stop fucking doing it