Ingredients

Ingredients: A white cellular blanket. Two old 'Amateur Photographer' magazines, one open, the other closed and revealing it dates from 1976. A plastic set-square dating from the late 1920s or early 1930s with its aperture highlighting a photograph by Patrick Lichfield of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, with other photographs by the said Lichfield also in view to confirm his photographic credentials and thus endorse the Olympus OM2 camera in the double-page advertisement.

The Duke of Windsor had seven Christian names and was once the King of the United Kingdom. When 'Prince of Wales' he had been sexually adventurous which alarmed Mr Baldwin, a British Prime Minister at intervals during the 1920s and 1930s. (It is probably true to say that the British Establishment felt even greater alarm over the Prince of Wales's support for Adolf Hitler and his sympathies for Nazi philosophy). Eventually Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David had to stop being King. He went to live in Paris with Mrs Wallis Simpson, an American who had divorced her first husband and was seeking a divorce from her second. She on her own could be a subject for a racy dissertation much longer than this.

Lester Piggott, whose photograph also appears, was a British champion jockey with a record nine Epsom Derby victories. He also had a less distinguished record of a criminal nature and served time in jail for fraud.

Other famous celebrities who were photographed by Lord Lichfield are not mentioned here because they are not as famous or infamous as they might have thought they were.

Patrick Lichfield inherited the Earldom of Lichfield in 1960 having previously been only Thomas Patrick John Anson. Wikipedia remarks that Lichfield “built up his own reputation, partly as a result of having access to the Royal Family”.

I took this photograph using a Nikon D2Xs and a Nikkor-S 35mm f/2.8. In everything I have read concerning that lens it is regarded as something inferior and fit only for amateur use. So I compared it with the professional Nikkor, the 35mm f/2, from the same period. I thought they were both very good, with one gathering more light than the other as the chief difference. After some years of owning both, I sold the expensive professional one and kept the cheap amateur one.