Queen Elizabeth II back in the Royal Rolls Royce after leaving the Royal Variety Performance on Monday November 26, 2001. This took place in the Dominion Theatre on Tottenham Court Road in the centre of London. Prince Philip was in the car with Queen Elizabeth but the car frame obscures him. He might have found some humour in that. Story of his life.
Here is the full frame of the same picture. I like the out-of-focus policewoman at the front. It gives a clear foreground-middleground-background separation to the scene. She also provides a narrative to the scene. The Queen is clearly the object of people’s attention as well as the focal point of the picture.
I was just visiting London at the time and had met a friend for a drink nearby. When I saw the fuss I asked a Policewoman what it was. When she told me I thought it would be worth hanging on for an hour for a chance to see the actual Queen. Standing around waiting drives me mad however. So I went to the Starbucks around the corner on New Oxford St and sketched upstairs for an hour while I waited. This used to be a nice place to sit and sketch as it has a decent view out onto the street, especially from upstairs. It didn’t feel as nice in more recent years when I lived in London. I used to sketch there sometimes after work or evenings out. Maybe it’s the difference between daytime and nighttime.
This picture is available on on my Fine Art America page for prints or for printing on custom things like mugs, phone covers etc.
The Queen and Prince Philip in the car as it sets off
The next picture shows both the Queen and Prince Philip in the car as it set off. The car is moving at this point so Prince Philip is a little blurred but clearly visible if not quite clearly recognisable.
These are street photographs really, and taken at night. There were floodlights outside the venue but still this was not a bright scene. I prefer available light photography and don’t use flash. I used mostly Ilford film back then but for the life of me I don’t remember the type. However it would have been either iso1600 or iso400 exposed and developed at 1600. I always tried for a good composition and never fretted about grain.
My lens maxed out at f2 so I used slow shutter speed, focussed for the Queen and panned with the car as well as I could as it moved off slowly. The Queen is reasonably clear so the blurring of Prince Philip may have been down to thin depth of field which you get at f2. The Queen still is not completely sharp and I guess that is partly due to having guessed focus as it is a manual camera.
Learning Photography
I was still learning how to take pictures back then and it was expensive and unnecessary to print a lot of mistakes. The prints also often came back cropped. You need to clearly see what’s wrong if you’re going to learn. I always aimed to get everything as correct as possible in the frame, cropping made it difficult to properly assess the composition. So I made myself content with contact sheets and a lupe instead. This worked really well until the camera shop changed to a digital contact sheet process which again cropped each picture.
Scanning my own negatives
At that point I had a computer and was beginning to learn Photoshop so I started scanning the negatives myself. My first scanner, an Agfa Scanwise – I think it was a Snapscan Touch – was great but couldn’t scan negatives. It eventually developed an uneven colour cast beneath the glass which I was unable to fix. So next I got an Epson Perfection 3590 Photo which has a dedicated negative scanning capability. However this didn’t give me the full frame and cropped about 8% of the image. But at least I could clearly see bad exposures or blurring and was able to learn to compensate a little using Photoshop. I still use this scanner for drawings and love it.
Now I also have a Plustek OpticFilm 8100 which seems to really do the job and gives me the full frame, give or take. The SilverFast scanning software makes a nicer scan out of any bad exposures, so I feel like a less-bad photographer…
