Viewpoint
As the Princess of Wales’s ‘Mother’s Day-gate’ picture shows, spontaneity is sometimes best in photography
As I write this, the furore over the Princess of Wales’s Mother’s Day photo still dominates the headlines. To recap: Kate, Princess of Wales, has fessed-up to editing an image taken of herself and her three children, released to mark Mother’s Day and her recent discharge from hospital. Nothing particularly newsworthy there, you’d think, except it was not edited at all well, prompting major press agencies to pull it from circulation due to obvious manipulation (see our news story on page 4). To add to the embarrassment, the image was taken by the future King.
The story went off like a firework, and what should have been a happy family shot ended up feeding lots of conspiracy theories about the real state of her health. Even the Daily Mail, usually cheerleaders for the Wales family in its interminable feud with Harry and Meghan, thundered ‘The Palace Can No Longer Be Trusted.’ The Sun, meanwhile, reported that the Princess is ‘very sad, just wanting the picture to be perfect.’ This is the problem in a nutshell.
Whoever edited the image – the Princess so far is taking sole responsibility – lacked the skills to create the ‘perfect’ shot. Given the intense scrutiny this picture was bound to receive, it was only a matter of time before the rather ham-fisted image blending was revealed.
Keep it simple Ironically, a spontaneous phone snap of the Princess with the kids, while not technically perfect, would have avoided all this upset. There is nothing at all wrong with editing images – long before digital, film images were tweaked in the darkroom – but being too much of a control freak or perfectionist in photography can backfire badly. That is the first lesson. The second is that if you are going to work up a picture in this way, get an
