Prince Harry gives selfie-image advice

Prince Harry, told Red Heads Rule! signmaker Ethan Toscan, 12, "it's awesome to be a redhead". Photo / AP

Prince Harry finds a fellow redhead and shares his royal photographic wisdom.

When a prince is in your midst, it doesn't pay to be too obsessed with one's selfie. That was the message Prince Harry delivered, albeit in jocular fashion, while meeting the public in Australia.

As usual, a crowd of hundreds thrust cameras in the Prince's direction during a walkabout in Canberra, but one teenage girl has more than a snatched picture of their encounter, after a light-hearted dressing-down from the Prince was captured on video.

As he passed her, she leant over the railings to beg for a selfie. "No, I hate selfies," the Prince replied. "Seriously, you need to get out of it. I know you're young, but selfies are bad."

His remarks, which were picked up by an Australian television crew, were met with laughter in the crowd, causing the Prince to double back and face the girl again, smiling as he insisted: "Just take a normal photograph."

Prince Harry made his remarks during the only scheduled public appearance of a month-long attachment to the Australian army.

Spurning an umbrella, he walked among the crowd waiting in the drizzle. For 20 minutes, he entertained them, high-fiving a young child and even offering his cheek for a woman to kiss.

Twelve-year-old Ethan Toscan caught the Prince's eye with his banner declaring 'Red Heads Rule!' He said Prince Harry high-fived him then said that having ginger hair was "the number one thing one person can ever be". "He said that I was fabulous in making the sign and it's awesome to be a redhead," said Ethan. The Prince visited Australia's national war memorial, laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and paused at the pool of reflection, which marks the sacrifice of more than 100,000 Australian troops, before a bugler sounded Last Post.

Captain Wales, as he is known in the military, brought with him a letter from the Queen to Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin, chief of the Australian defence force, thanking the military for welcoming her grandson. She wrote that the timing was apt, 100 years after Australian and British troops served together in the invasion of Gallipoli. The campaign will be commemorated at a memorial service on the peninsula later this month, which Prince Harry and the Prince of Wales will attend.

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