Welcome
Welcome to my website, The Michael Hudson Collection. Although the website is brand new and in a beta version, the photos are anything but new. Some of them date back to 1984, but all have recently been scanned from the original camera negatives and slides. Hundreds of hours were devoted to making the scans and many more hours have gone into creating the website. It’s been a labour of love and I’m looking forward to sharing some of these very personal images with you.
The images of the Royal Family will of course be the most popular on the website. Over twenty-seven years since the death of the Princess of Wales, she’s still enormously popular, and thousands of Facebook pages, Instagram accounts and websites have been devoted to her memory. And if you keep up with current events at all, it’s rare that much time goes by without a story about William or Harry, King Charles or the late Queen Elizabeth being in the news.
This website is a trip back in time to a simpler period when there was no social media, no internet and no digital photography. When you would take a picture… then had to wait– sometimes weeks– before seeing the results. Photographers had to know what they were doing, otherwise they’d be in for a disappointing surprise when the pictures came back under or overexposed, or out of focus. When I look back at all the thousands of photos I made in the 1980’s or 1990’s, I’m proud of the consistent quality I was able to achieve, specially for a photographer who was still in his late teens and early twenties when most of them were taken.
These are historical pictures of a bygone era. Look at the people in the background. Some are holding cameras, but most aren’t. They’re simply living in the moment, being in the presence of the Royal Family. Look at the fashions people were wearing. Notice the kinds of cars on the streets and the lack of a mobile phone anywhere. The children in the pictures are all in their forties now, many with children of their own. Most people over fifty back then are now gone, or in their late 80’s or 90’s… a sobering thought.
Every image you see is very personal to me; they represent many hours of standing in the rain, the cold or under the hot summer sun, waiting for a brief glimpse of one of the royals. Or time spent at a polo match on a Sunday afternoon, hoping Charles and Diana might show up. Much planning (and a lot of train fares and petrol money) went into these images, and I often went without lunch or dinner while in pursuit of a good photo. But what fun it was.
I hope you enjoy my photography. Drop me an email and let me know what you think.
Mike Hudson, photographer
February 2025