How the Royal Wedding Photographer Got Prince George and Princess Charlotte to Sit Still for Those Portraits

Elise Taylor

Updated May 23, 2018 at 6:31 PM

Alexi Lubomirski had a special trick up his sleeve to capture the attention of the 10 children in the royal wedding party.

Getting a small child to sit still for a portrait is a difficult task. But wrangling 10? It almost seems impossible—especially when you are photographing the new Duke and Duchess of Sussex along with all their bridesmaids and pageboys after their showstopping wedding.

But that was part of photographer Alexi Lubomirski’s job on May 19. As the pictures show, he pulled it off—look at that grin on Prince George!—but it took some serious sweet-talking.

“I’ve been asked by everybody, ‘How did you control the kids?’ And as we were setting up the big family shots, and I was placing Tthe Duke of Edinburgh and Her Majesty onto their chairs, I could hear the kids started crying in the background and there was some chaos,” he said in a recent interview. Luckily, he found a secret weapon: Smarties candies. (For American readers, note that in the U.K. Smarties are more like M&Ms.)

“As soon as the kids came onto the set, I immediately just shouted out, ‘Who likes Smarties?’, and then everybody hands up, smiles, even some of the adults I think put their hands up,” he says. “. . . That was our magic word of the day, so thank you, Smarties.”

The on-the-brink-of-chaos portrait isn’t the only shot that Lubomirski captured that day. He also took an intimate portrait of the couple on a Windsor castle terrace, where they had naturally sat in a moment of happy exhaustion. The joy of it all wasn’t lost on Lubomirski, who said, “This has been a beautiful chapter in my career and life, that I will happily never forget.”

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