Hello, I'm Kirstie Young.

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My cast away this week is the photographer Rankin.

He started out doing fashion shoots and he's certainly very good at making pretty young things look even prettier.

But his work and influence have spread well beyond the glossy pages of style bibles.

From Congolese warwadows to genudling pensioners, his skill is capturing a moment of spontaneous and often surprising truth.

He should really be doing people's tax returns.

He went to college to study accountancy, but his head was turned in his halls of residence.

When the art students seemed to be having all the fun within a few years, Kate Moss was posing for his camera in nothing but a fedora and high leather boots.

However, his reputation for a raunch was put on the back burner the day he photographed the queen.

His picture of a serene and smiling monarch now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.

Photography is, he says, like a seduction, it's a relationship compressed into a moment.

I can't imagine Rankin that there was much seduction taking place the day you photographed her majesty, wasn't it?

It's so hard to talk about the queen because everybody has such preconceived notions of what she's liking.

She was one of the only people I really researched before I met her and I had to immense them out of respect for her as a person.

And in the day that I was at the palace to shoot her, I saw a walking down a really long corridor with a very tall footman and they were laughing.

And I thought, that's exactly what I wanted her to be like.

So when I actually took the photograph, I had five minutes to shoot and so I've got to get this.

So I really, I just started pretending almost like I was Austin Powers and saying, ma'am, can you smile ma'am?

And eventually I got that one big smiling shot and that was it.

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