After a short period of uncertainty, on yesterday’s Mothering Sunday in the UK, that soon turned into controversy, and then a press frenzy, Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales, the future Queen Consort next to the future King William, had to apologise today for “..for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused.” Kate owned up to being the perpetrator of the heinous crime of, well, not editing her family photos very well: “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing.”

The seemingly innocuous and rather pleasant family snap of Kate and her three children, taken, we are told, by William, was distributed by the Royal Family’s official media relations office at Kensington Palace. It was accepted by a number of photo press agencies, including Reuters, AP, and Getty, and duly distributed.

But a catalogue, or should that be ‘montage’, of errors, led to a ridiculous media circus performance, with the photo being issued with a so-called ‘kill order’, or basically being withdrawn from distribution. This ‘closing the stable door after the horse had bolted’ episode was after the realisation that the photo was an in-expertly pieced-together cut-and-shut Photoshop job. In turn, this led to hyperactive speculation about Kate’s health after major surgery at the beginning of the year, subsequent lack of public appearances, and the potential motives for trying to deceive everyone with a Photoshop job.

From the photography perspective, my own personal opinion is that the press people at Kensington Palace can’t escape blame, and neither can the photo desk editors at the independent press agencies, who accepted and distributed the image.

Where was the quality control at the Palace? Why didn’t the press agencies, who have expert photo editors, not spot the suspicious attributes of the shot immediately, before rubber-stamping its distribution?

The whole event remains cloaked in a a lot of secrecy, which is how Royal advisers operate. No replacement image has been offered. We don’t know if someone in the Royal household simply saw the photo and said to Kate: “Oooh, nice photo, can we use this?” Apart from poor old Kate, nobody else has admitted any concurrent guilt.

My message to Kate is; for an amateur Photoshop job, it wasn’t actually that bad. Keep it up and don’t get put off by the silliness surrounding you!