The queen and Leibowitz exchanged some comments, and completed the shoot.
The BBC, as a trailer for a forthcoming documentary A Year with the Queen, aired video on Tuesday, showing the queen walking down a corridor while telling her lady-in-waiting that 'we have done enough' and she was not 'changing anything', and suggested that the queen had walked out of the photo-shoot.
Trouble was, the video was of the queen actually walking to the shoot.
'In this trailer there is a sequence that implies that the queen left a sitting prematurely,' the BBC said in a statement. 'This was not the case, and the actual sequence of events was mis-represented.'
'The BBC would like to apologise to both the queen and Annie Leibovitz for any upset this may have caused.'
The Telegraph and other British newspapers reported that the clip was not even intended for public consumption. That it was finally aired owed, the BBC reportedly said, to a mix-up with the company that had edited the trailer.
The contentious clip, the Telegraph reports, captured the moment when the queen arrived in her Order of the Garter regalia in the White Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace.
Leibovitz, who was at the time shooting four portraits to mark the queen's visit to the United States last May, reportedly said: 'I think it will look better without the crown because the garter robe is so...'
The queen shot an icy glance at the photographer and reportedly said: 'Less dressy? What do you think this is?', referring to her robes which came complete with diamonds and ermine.
The final portrait showed the queen complete with crown. The queen is shown gazing out over the gardens of Buckingham Palace -- a photograph that, the Telegraph reports, bears a remarkable resemblance to a famed shot by the legendary Cecil Beaton, of the queen's mother in a similar pose, shot in 1939.
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The New York-based photographer, who works out of a Manhattan studio and lives in the West Village in an apartment she once shared with her long-time lover Susan Sontag (who died in 2004), has filmed a naked Whoopi Goldberg immersed in a bathtub filled with milk; cycling superstar Lance Armstrong naked and in full flight on his bike; soccer superstar David Beckham on horseback, with sword and shield against a flaming backdrop as Prince Charming (with Hollywood actor Scarlet Johannson playing Cinderella, for a Disney promotion); and for a diamond firm's promotional once shot a young girl, dressed in rags stretched out on a cross against a background of flames shooting skywards.
Her most iconic shots, however, were her Vanity Fair cover image of a pregnant Demi Moore, for which the actor had to stand still for 12 hours while a body suit was literally painted on her, and a Rolling Stone cover showing a buck-naked John Lennon curled up in fetal position against wife Yoko Ono, gently kissing her cheek -- a shot that was captured just hours before the legendary Beatle was gunned down outside his apartment building opposite New York's Central Park.
In a recent survey of newspaper editors, the Lennon and Moore covers were ranked numbers one and two in a list of the best magazine covers of the last 40 years.
A Year with the Queen will be broadcast in September, a couple of weeks after television channels around the world finish their coverage of the 10th death anniversary of Queen Elizabeth's late former daughter-in-law Diana, Princess of Wales.
