While covering this sort of visit sounded exciting, I knew it would also be a day filled with tedious waiting around, and it began when applying for accreditation.

A passport wasn't good enough for a royal visits pass.

I had to supply a birth certificate, which I had misplaced over the years. To get a new birth certificate, I had to show my passport.

Accreditation meant we were allocated a spot from which we were not allowed to move.

My spot would be next to the sheep yards on a farm near Sorell.

I met our reporter Rose Bolger at the Hobart office and by lunchtime, we had parked the Lancer in long grass at a Sorell farm.

It took only a quick glance around the farm to realise that I had been allocated one of the better spots to shoot from.

It was long, maybe 30 metres, with a roof to keep us dry, shared only with a Launceston TV cameraman (can't remember who it was now), another TV camera, and from memory, only two other still cameras.

Prince Charles would walk in "over there", our guide explained, pointing to a gate. A dog would round up sheep, and the sheep would walk into the shearing shed.

Crammed into the entrance of that little shearing - an opening the size of a single garage door - were a dozen cameras.

The act began with the arrival of a white Holden Statesman gliding silently across the wet grass.

The door was opened for the prince. There was no Camilla, but there was a lot handshaking, and then he was escorted, as our guide had said, to the gate and the sheepdog ran off to do his thing.

The prince and the farmer waffled on for a while, inspected wool and posed nonchalantly against a fence.

The dog herded sheep into a pen and ran along their backs.

I moved to the end of our allocated spot where it was higher, so I could zoom in to compress the background.

As a line of sheep filed along in a race towards the prince and the farmer, a couple of them jumped over an imaginary obstacle.

I zoomed in and hoped for the best and to my delight, another sheep leapt up right in front of the prince.

We had another spot allocated to us at a wharf in Hobart, where Camilla and Charles were due to walk through a warehouse later in the afternoon after a street walk at Salamanca.

It poured rain again.

Camilla didn't want to walk in the rain and appeared early.

There were no international cameras, only The Mercury photographer and me.

An aide strode up and barked at us to get out there and follow Camilla around the room.

I was aware that I was going to have to file photos imminently and looked for faces in the crowd that I might know were from the North, so I wouldn't have to chase up names.

When the international media arrived we scurried back to our spot on the platform by the door.

Meanwhile, Charles persisted with the street walk in the rain, seeing as there were thousands there to see him.

Premier Lara Giddings put out her hand to greet him at the exact moment he lifted his hand to wave, and the premier's hand quickly went down.

It was a hilariously awkward moment that Rose and I laughed about for the rest of the evening.

It was getting late and I hadn't filed a thing.

Weighing up what we had against what more we might get, we decided it was time to go, and hoped there was impending no royal assassination attempt. (If there was, at least The Mercury and The Examiner would both miss it and not just one of us.)

Back then, The Examiner was not renowned for its capacity to send photos remotely.

The one laptop for all six photographers to share had a faulty battery and worked only if plugged into an inverter with the car engine running.

Unlike The Examiner's pool car, it was notoriously slow, and it sat on the passenger seat copying files off the camera card all the way to Bridgewater McDonald's, and practically as far as Jericho before it was ready for me to pull over and work out what to send back.

A quick call back to the office from the picnic ground at Tunbridge made things easy.

The night news editor wanted only a couple of photos, the rest could wait for the morning.

This was such a relief, and I fired off the sheep-jumping photo and another few.

When I say fired, it still took quarter of an hour to send the compressed JPEGs.

As a bonus, on the way home there was another storm, and I got a great scene of a rainbow and the Oatlands windmill.

The best part of the visit was next morning when I went to the letterbox to retrieve the paper.

I knew my photo wasn't bad, but in combination with Dean Southwell's brilliant headline, our paper looked really good that morning.