The waving hand of royalty

This is a story about my photograph of Prince Charles, actually just his waving hand through the window of his passing limousine. While working for the Goldstream Gazette, a weekly newspaper on Vancouver Island in early April of 1979, we heard that Prince Charles would be paying a visit to Pearson College UWC ( United World College ) of the Pacific, this event happened shortly before I left the Gazette for a staff photographer's job at the Brampton Daily Times in Ontario.

 As I recall the visit was a closed affair so no media were invited on to the campus grounds, but we had heard that the Prince would be traveling along Metchosin Road in a motorcade and that students from Sangster Elementary school which is located along the road would be out waving to the Prince as he passed by. So I stood there too with my trusty Nikon.

 Soon the motorcade came traveling down the road and slowed down, but did not stop, the Prince had rolled down the window of his car, but because he was sitting quite far back in the rear seat all I could see was his waving hand, so that was the picture that I got when he passed by school and the kids and the picture that my editor's used in the next week's edition. I think I only shot about 3 or 4frames as I had no motor drive on my camera.

 Unfortunately I don't have any original prints anymore, just a newspaper page where the photo was featured along with others as part of "My Favorite Photographs" when I left the paper. I recall having shot the photo with a Nikon F or F2 as I had two cameras and used my 105mm lens. I had three lenses at the time, a 35mm,105mm and a 200mm. I never had motor drive on my Nikon cameras when I worked at the Gazette.

One thing of note when I arrived at the Brampton Times in May of 1979 newsroom staff were curious that I had no motor drives on my cameras shortly after that that I bought a MD-3 motor drive for my Nikon F2 which moved film past the shutter at about 4 frames a second. Also in my Gazette years, I had nothing wider than a 35mm lens, I also bought a 24mm wide angle lens a few months after I started at the Brampton paper.