The pictures of the shoot post the wedding ceremony of Meghan and Harry are out, and people can’t stop scrolling through. All credit to Photographer Alexi Lubomirski! Getting a small child to sit still for a portrait is a difficult task. So we can only imagine how it must have been to manage wrangling 10! And all the more when they happen to be the bridesmaids and pageboys of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

But that was part of Alexi’s job on May 19. And quite evidently, he pulled it off rather well! Did you look at that grin on Prince George? Sure must have taken some serious sweet-talking (oops!)

“I’ve been asked by everybody, ‘How did you control the kids?’ And as we were setting up the big family shots, and I was placing the Duke of Edinburgh and Her Majesty onto their chairs, I could hear the kids started crying in the background and there was some chaos,” Vogue reported from his media interaction. Wonder what the secret was? No brownie points for guessing, Smarties candies is the answer!

“As soon as the kids came onto the set, I immediately just shouted out, ‘Who likes Smarties?’ and all the hands were up, even some of the adults I think put their hands up,” he said. “That was our magic word of the day, so thank you, Smarties.”

But other than this on-the-brink-of-chaos portrait, Alexi took an intimate portrait of the couple on the Windsor castle terrace, where they had naturally sat in a moment of happy exhaustion. The joy of it all wasn’t lost on Lubomirski, “This has been a beautiful chapter in my career and life, that I will happily never forget.”

“It was fascinating to actually get them in front of the camera and try to adapt what I usually do with other people to them,” Lubomirski said. “It’s the same as trying to get somebody comfortable, when you’re seated next to them at a dinner party. You just talk to them, you smile a lot and you ask them questions,” adding that people relax “as soon as they realize I’m not a tortured artist who is going to force my creative idea onto you.”

But last weekend wasn’t his first encounter with Prince William or Prince Charles. As an assistant to Mario Testino years ago, they shot the younger royal on his 20th birthday and the elder, on another occasion, feeding his chickens. Back then his test shots were published in The Face magazine, post which Harper Bazaar’s had tapped him to shoot their first cover.

Born in England to a Peruvian/English mother and a Polish/French father, at the age of eight Alexi moved to Botswana with his mother and English stepfather. After finishing his homework “super-quickly and really badly,” Lubomirski watched six hours of TV, flicking through the five available channels incessantly and making up stories with the snippets of images. Although his own lineage makes him a prince, relatability is his calling card. “On set, I always joke you have to be a psychologist, a therapist, a host of a party and then when everything is done, you can take a picture and be a photographer,” he said.

While the world will now forever link him to The Firm, as the royal family is known, the photographer defines his life in different terms. Husband, father, vegan, fur-free, author, poet, diversity and sustainability advocate, and Concern Worldwide ambassador, all apply. “Apart from the massive honor it is to be able to do these [wedding] pictures, if it gives me a little bit more of a platform to shout from, then that’s a blessing,” he said.

H/T: Vogue and WWD