How the royal photographer notched up a sweet success
HOW do you get 10 pageboys and bridesmaids to behave for an official royal wedding photograph?
Bribe them with Smarties.
Alexi Lubomirski, 42, who took the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s pictures on Saturday, revealed how he used the chocolate treats to persuade the children to pose so perfectly for the family portrait with the Queen.
“I’ve been asked ‘How did you control the kids?’ and as we were setting up the big family shots, and I was placing the Duke of Edinburgh and Her Majesty on to their chairs, I could hear the kids start crying in the background and there was some chaos,” Mr Lubomirski disclosed, saying parents were trying to “wrangle” their offspring into place.
“And then I heard this magic word behind me – that was ‘Smarties’.” Mr Lubomirski, a New York-based fashion photographer, was unfamiliar with the sweets but learned that they were “an English candy”.
He explained: “They were bribed with one Smartie here and one Smartie there, so as soon as the kids came on to the set I immediately just shouted, ‘Who likes Smarties?’
“And then everybody [had] hands up, smiles, even some adults I think put their hands up. And so that was our magic word of the day. So thank you, Smarties.”
For the next shot, with just the newly-weds and the children, he said: “I’d already used my Smarties trick. They weren’t going to fall for that again”. Instead, he asked if anyone still had sweets in their mouths. “Everybody put their hands up … there were a lot of frames I couldn’t use because all the kids had their hands in the air.”
Mr Lubomirski and his team had just 25 minutes to shoot the pictures. Photographing the Queen, he said, was “one to knock off the bucket list”.