When the Queen Looked Back

It was my first week as a full-time press photographer. Ten days on the job. A picture editor at a small agency had sent me to Windsor for the afternoon with instructions to wander, use the lenses, learn what each focal length actually does to the shape of a scene.

I was practising silhouettes with fast shutter speeds. Compressing distance with a long lens. Trying to make ordinary streets look like something. And then I saw a poster.

Her Majesty the Queen would be opening a new wing of the Windsor Shopping Centre the following week.

The first no

Back at the office I asked the news editor if I could cover it. He said no, gently. There would be a wall of national press photographers there. My time, and the agency's money, was better spent on the small stories nobody else was chasing. A press agency is a business. He wasn't wrong.

I filed the poster away in my head and got on with the week.

The day of

The day came. No sex offenders at Reading Crown Court. No dogs that could bark the alphabet in the local papers. A slow news morning. The editor looked up.

Off you go to Windsor.

Ten days into a career, I did not know where to stand. I did not know which lens to trust. I did not know which way she would turn, or whether my settings were right, or a hundred other small things that would decide whether I came back with something or nothing.

I stood in a small pen with photographers who had been doing this for decades. Waited. Watched.

The split second

The next few minutes passed in a blink. A hand raised. A plaque unveiled. And in the middle of it, for perhaps half a second, the most photographed person on the planet looked directly towards me.

I kept shooting. I hoped the camera was set the way I had set it. I knew that in a moment it would all be over, and that whatever I had, I had.

What I actually learned

I went straight back to review the shots. There was one. Not the most contextual frame ever taken of the Queen. Not the one that would run on a front page. But mine. And it was one of the most exciting moments of my life as a photographer up to that point.

I have photographed her many times since. It never stopped being an honour. But that first frame taught me the three things I keep returning to, eighteen years later, as a coach.

**Optimism.** The poster on the wall was information. Most people walked past it. Optimism is what turns information into a question — *what if I went?* Without that quiet, slightly unreasonable "what if", nothing else happens.

**Perseverance.** I asked. I was told no. I didn't argue. I didn't sulk. I stayed useful, kept working the small stories, kept the door open. When the slow morning came, I was the one they thought of.

**Making your own luck.** This is the one people misread. Luck is not a lightning strike. Luck is the sum of how many rooms you put yourself in. You cannot control which second she turns her head. You can control whether you are standing there when she does.

Build the vessel

I did not have the language for it in 2008. I did later. It is the same idea I keep coming back to now — you cannot receive what you have not built a container to hold.

Wandering Windsor with a camera was building the vessel. Noticing the poster was building the vessel. Asking, being told no, and asking again with my behaviour rather than my mouth was building the vessel. Standing in that pen with a shaking hand and correct settings was building the vessel.

The Queen looked over for half a second. That was the gift. Everything before it was mine to do.

Most of the work in a life is quiet, unglamorous, and looks a lot like practice. You do it not because you know what is coming. You do it so that when something does, you are ready to catch it.

Ten days in. One frame. A career, quietly, beginning.