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EXCLUSIVE

By Michelle Crean

One Killarney photographer got the Royal seal of approval as his company was chosen as the only agency to officially photograph this week’s Royal visit – with his images beamed on news sites worldwide.

Sky News, the BBC, ITV were just some of the news outlets to feature the work of Julien Behal, originally from Woodlawn, and his team.

Julien, who previously covered the Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and Prince Charles and Camilla visits last year, was hired by the Dept. of Foreign Affairs who were working in unison with the British Embassy for Prince William and wife Kate’s three day visit to Ireland.

He, along with his team, were on hand to capture some of the most intimate moments, from their arrival at Dublin airport on Tuesday, a visit to Aras an Uachtarain, Garden of Remembrance where they laid a wreath, the Guinness Storehouse, and day two in Kildare on Wednesday, and in Galway yesterday (Thursday).

And to top off the experience Julien was specially selected as the only photographer allowed into a shop in Kildare with the couple who shopped for food with two local children as part of the Extern project, a charity which supports vulnerable young people.

“I’m very lucky,” Julien told the Killarney Advertiser. “It is a privileged position to be in that you’re the one asked to do it. It was very intimate and interesting to see the interaction between the couple. There was myself, the couple, the two children, the person on the till and a cop. I was the only media allowed in.”

Julien hired and worked alongside three of Ireland’s top photographers, Andrew Downes, Kenneth O’Halloran and Tom Honan, saying covering everything would have been impossible.

However, Julien was keen to add that without the help of office manager Louise Slevin it wouldn’t have been possible to get the images out to the media so quickly.

“She is a superstar, the heroine of the last three days. The challenge I faced was getting pics from onsite to instant transmission – on the kuff literally, getting them edited, approved, captioned and out. Everyone the couple visited over the three days wanted their photos straight away.”

Now he’s planning a totally different type of photography in Syria – to document the lost children of ISIS which he plans to photograph in the coming weeks.