There are people in many occupations that I have a great deal of sympathy for and one of these groups is photographers. In the recession and a time where even five year-olds own digital cameras their trade is one often deemed transferable to the first person who suggests ‘it’s OK, I’ll do it’ in place of hiring a professional.

Have you seen the lenses these people have? Some are worth more than a small car. I’m pretty sure they don’t buy them for fun; they do so because they get results, especially in the case of PR.

I’ve worked with many photographers and seen the results that come their work. A well managed shot can often be the difference between a nib (small news story) and a nice half or full page piece, which is valuable real estate in an industry where paginations are being squeezed for every penny. I understand that sometimes it isn’t a viable option, but when it is, the best photographers are worth their weight in gold.

However, the group I’ve the most sympathy for are local paper photographers, or to be more precise, those who take pictures of angry people. I was drawn to their plight when serial twitterer Peter Serafinowicz (all round funny man and the voice of Darth Maul) re-tweeted a tweet linking to a blog called ‘Angry people in local newspapers’. It isn’t the best designed blog in the world but, it has one goal, ‘celebrating excellence in the field of local newspaper photography’.

These people aren’t citizen journalists, or a young reporter with a camera, as the blog points out: ‘they are hugely skilled and poorly paid, and sent out to photograph miserable people pointing at dog turds.’

Their work won’t win any awards but they should. It’s their photos that make an otherwise moan-filled story in to one with an identifiable human angle and in some cases an absolutely hilarious viewing.

I should come clean. I have an ulterior motive for championing the work of these would be David Baileys, as I was once ‘an angry man with a kettle’. The link should tell you all you need to know about my plight, but in a nutshell I was without a gas supply and I had to get hot water from a kettle, something I was clearly not too happy about.

I’d like to emphasise that I’m not making light of the work featured on ‘Angry people in local newspapers’, far from it. Scan the blog and you will see that while many follow the formula of ‘angry person + offending article’ there are some that hint to the photographer trying to think outside the box – including: ‘shot from inside a tesco bag’, ‘massive hand’ and ‘shot through a sign’.

So, next time you have a photographer getting a bit flash with what you thought would be a straight forward shoot, bear in mind that a little creativity goes a long way and before they came to you, they might have spent the morning taking pictures of angry people.