On Saturday the 25th of July I photographed His Majesty King Abdullah II of Jordan — a fifteen-minute sitting undertaken on behalf of the regiment, for which I flew from Los Angeles. Fifteen minutes is nothing and everything. It is the same window Holbein would have been granted at the Tudor court, the same economy of time in which Van Dyck learned to read a face and fix a likeness before the sitter had finished settling into the chair. You do not get a second exposure with a king. You prepare for weeks so that you are ready for a quarter of an hour.