Little and large guard The Queen…
There’s a lot of interest in this pic at the moment so here’s a bit about how it came about. I got the call that The Queen had been admitted to hospital and was told to go straight there. She is recovering from gastroenteritis and I knew there’d be next to no chance of seeing her, and with it being her first day in hospital little chance of any visitors. Thus it would be a ‘watching brief’ and a picture of the hospital would be the best that I could reasonably expect. When I arrived I saw these two policemen were guarding the door. From the far side of the road it was hard to get a perspective (I thought at first the smaller one was a midget!) It turns out he is 5ft 6, and called PC Tony Thich (pronounced titch!), not tall, but far from a midget. The reason for the size difference is the taller officer, called PC Anthony Wallyn, who stands at a might 7ft 2inches! With both of them being called Tony it was obvious the journalists would love it.
After taking the picture I thought it was funny, so I tweeted the (watermarked) image and in a few minutes it was retweeted hundreds of times. Plenty of jokes followed, including ‘the long and short of it’ and ‘the long arm of the law’, and they are still coming in today.
As a photographer you are always on the lookout for a picture that illustrates the story. You also need to be aware of any quirky moments that will make an interesting picture in their own right. These two Police Officers guarding The Queen managed to tick both boxes, and produce an image that somehow seems quintessentially British.
Brilliant! That’s a cracker of a frame, squire.