Queen Elizabeth II was the most photographed, the most loved and talked about, spied upon, praised, criticized, popular | dG1fRDdpeC1hdEdKQjA
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00:00 Our mural is a much easier place to be, to photograph, much freer, no security.
00:06 The only people with us were her dresser, her page and her driver.
00:12 It's very relaxed up there. The escapades close while they're up there anyway.
00:16 One of the great themes both for painters but more especially I think for photographers is the figure in landscape.
00:25 And one of my favourite paintings going back a long time since I was at art school was Gainsborough's portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews.
00:35 And this young couple who've just got married are in the field, dressed up in the most unlikely of clothes for being in a field.
00:45 And so this got me to thinking that how important a figure in landscape would be.
00:52 If I could photograph Her Majesty in a similar vein, I realised it hadn't really been done before as a portrait, then that's what I was going to try and do.
01:03 Being asked to go out into the wilds of Balmoral, fully clothed in the thistle robes, was just a novelty.
01:12 I didn't want the landscape to be dominant. I wanted it to be sympathetic to a figure in landscape.
01:20 The figure had to be the main focus, but everything else had to contribute to the picture.
01:27 So when I saw this location, I thought well, the river or the beck will mirror the robe.
01:37 There's some pine trees there with dark green which will mirror the thistle robe.
01:46 It was important to me that I had infinity so the eyes could go right to the background, stretching right to the distant hillside.
01:55 And in the foreground there was heather.
01:58 Funny enough, if you take the Queen out of that picture, take the figure out, you wouldn't really notice it.
02:04 You'd drive past it, walk past it and think oh that's a pretty view.
02:07 But a pretty view doesn't make a landscape. Put a figure in it and it works.
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