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For more than 10 hours after the news broke that detectives had taken the unprecedented step to arrest Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, there was total silence from police and the former prince himself.
Then at 7pm, news that he had been released from a police station in Norfolk emerged, accompanied by a paparazzi-style image of the former prince slumped in the back of a car. The image landed on front pages across the globe.
Phil Noble is a photojournalist for Reuters and took the picture that will undoubtedly be talked about and reproduced for years to come. “The photo gods were on my side,” he said on Friday, describing it as “a little bit surreal”.
“It was one of those kind of ‘pinch me’ moments where you look at the back of the camera, you’re tired, it’s been a long day, you know you’ve got him. And then I said to my colleague: ‘Can you just double check? Is this him?’ Because you want to make sure. You can’t believe that you’ve got him as well as I did.”
But what does it take to capture a frame like this?
When news broke of Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest, Noble jumped into his car and travelled the six hours from his home in Manchester to Norfolk. He told Reuters there were 20 police stations where Mountbatten-Windsor could have been, but after a tipoff, he headed to the station in the historic market town of Aylsham.
Hours passed and Noble had made the decision to pack up and start heading to a local hotel, but moments later he was called back: Mountbatten-Windsor’s cars had arrived. This moment as a photographer is terrifying, the chance of getting a well-exposed, sharp image from a moving vehicle in complete darkness is like winning the lottery.
Noble shot six frames. In the era of film that would be like taking a single frame and crossing your fingers while you wait for it to be developed in a lab later on. Two of the images were blank, the next two showed police; one was out of focus, but the final frame was well composed, sharp, clean and well exposed.
Despite the unflattering nature of the picture, there is no doubt about the degree of skill – and luck – needed to capture it. Noble would have been contending with reflective glass, which often makes it impossible for a camera to focus. If it does, then getting enough light to hit the subject to allow for correct exposure is the next challenge. Often high-speed flash units are used to create light where there is none.
Then there is the timing, with a fast-moving vehicle the photographer has fractions of a second to hold down the trigger and hope their shutter speed is fast enough to create a sharp image. All this while attempting not to get hit by a car.
“You can plan and use your experience and know roughly what you need to do, but still everything needs to align,” said Noble. “When you’re doing car shots it’s more luck than judgment.”
Some photojournalists such as Australia’s Martin Keep of AFP would argue ingenuity can also play a vital role on these assignments. He famously created his own camera rig with additional lights and lens hoods to capture the only image of Australian Erin Patterson arriving to court during her trial for murdering her husband’s parents and aunt with toxic mushrooms. He managed to take the picture as she arrived at court in the back of a very tinted, very fast police van.
The final factor in a shoot like this is patience – hours if not days are spent just staring in the same spot waiting for what could possibly be the next big thing, and in an age of AI imagery there is nothing more real than moments like these.
“It was a proper old school news day,” said Noble. He added: “It’s a man shot at night through the back of a windscreen. Is that the best photo I’ve ever taken? No. Is it up there as one of the most important? 100%. When you work in news, it’s not an exact science. The best photos aren’t always the most newsworthy.”
