Okay, so let’s talk about those Annie Leibovitz photos of Queen Elizabeth. You’ve seen ’em, right? They’re everywhere. Real iconic stuff, supposedly capturing the essence of, well, royalty and all that.
I went through a phase a while back, got a bit fixated on them. Not just scrolling past, but really trying to pick them apart. I had this thought, you know, “What’s the big secret here?” I even dusted off my old camera, thinking I’d try to figure out her ‘magic’. Not photographing royalty, mind you, just trying to get that vibe she creates. Sounded simple enough in my head.
My Grand Photographic Adventure (Spoiler: Not So Grand)
So, I tried. Oh boy, did I try. Dragged my family in as reluctant models. Told them to look “dignified.” You can imagine how that went.
- The Famous Leibovitz Light: She makes it look so effortless, that dramatic, often quite moody lighting. Me? I spent hours fiddling with a couple of cheap lamps. My living room ended up looking less like a regal portrait session and more like a scene from a low-budget detective movie. My dog looked particularly concerned.
- The Setting Stakes: Right, so she gets these incredible locations, or makes simple ones look profound. My backdrop was a beige wall and a wilting houseplant. Didn’t quite have the same gravitas as Windsor Castle, funnily enough.
- Capturing “Majesty”: This was the real kicker. How do you direct someone to exude quiet power and historical weight when they’re mostly thinking about what’s for dinner? The Queen obviously had a certain presence, but Leibovitz, she had to channel that, frame it, light it, in what I bet was a super high-pressure, time-limited situation.
The results? Let’s just say no one’s calling me to photograph the new King anytime soon. It was mostly a lot of faffing about, a bit of a laugh, but honestly, pretty frustrating. You see these polished final images splashed everywhere and you just don’t think about the sweat and probably the sheer panic that goes into making them happen.
So, What Was the Point of All That Faffing?
Here’s the thing, though. This whole ridiculous exercise of mine wasn’t completely pointless. It wasn’t about me suddenly becoming a top-tier portrait photographer. Obviously. What it did, though, was slap me in the face with a big dose of reality about what goes into work like that.
It’s like when I decided I was going to build my own website from scratch to save a few quid. Hours of YouTube tutorials, lines of code that did absolutely nothing I wanted them to do, and a design that looked like it was made in 1998. I eventually gave up and used a template builder. But you know what? After that mess, I looked at professionally designed websites with a whole new level of awe. It wasn’t just pretty pictures and nice fonts; it was structure, usability, endless tweaking I’d never even considered.
And that’s how I feel now looking at those Leibovitz photos of the Queen, or any really good professional photography, for that matter. It’s not just “click.” It’s a thousand decisions, it’s understanding light, psychology, context, history even. It’s about vision. You realize most people just consume these images, “Oh, nice photo,” and move on. They don’t see the battles fought to get that shot, the technical skill, the artistic eye, the sheer bloody-mindedness to pull it off under pressure.
So yeah, my photos were pants. But it hammered home that the gap between an amateur fiddling about and a pro like Leibovitz working with someone like the Queen… well, it’s not just a gap, it’s a bloody chasm. And you only really get that when you try to take even one clumsy step across it yourself. Makes you respect the craft a whole lot more, instead of just scrolling past it on your phone.
