The official engagement portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge was captured by celebrated photographer Mario Testino, who has recalled the happy photoshoot with the couple who were “brimming with happiness”.
“I waited a long time, an hour or two, to make that picture perfect,” Testino told Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper.
“But I wasn’t totally satisfied. Then, when I’d finished the shoot, they were about to leave and they suddenly hugged in front of a radiator. I took my camera and that was the picture that ran everywhere — it was spontaneous emotion … you could see they were completely in love.”
Testino has a long-standing relationship with the royal family that goes back to his beautiful portraits of Princess Diana, which were commissioned for Vanity Fair in 1997 and caused a sensation by capturing the world’s most famous woman longing for love.
So when Prince William finally proposed to Kate and was ready to announce it to the world, he commissioned his late mother’s favourite photographer to take the official engagement portrait in the State Apartments at St James’ Palace on November 25, 2010.
Testino first met the Duchess of Cambridge in 2008 and could tell that William was “in love with Kate. I knew they would stay together”.
William, the photographer said, “is more like his mother, there’s a kindness and a gentleness there that instantly wins you over”.
Testino is fond of Kate, but said the Duchess does not remind him of Diana: “Kate, she is beautiful in a different way: she radiates happiness. She is comfortable in her love.”
The photographer, who was born in Peru but has called London home since the late 1970s, was this week awarded an OBE for his “services to photography and charity”.
“It’s wonderful!” he told the newspaper of his honour. “Like being in love with somebody for years who kept you at bay but then suddenly one day tells you, ‘I love you too.’”
