[7] She was educated at King Alfred School in Golders Green, and St Martin’s College of Art, both in London.
[7] Soames won an Evening Standard photography competition, winning five guineas, for her photograph of a youth in Trafalgar Square on New Year's Eve, 1960.
Working as a photojournalist, she documented the 1973 Arab–Israeli War with Sunday Times reporter Nicholas Tomalin who wrote in his last dispatch, while bombs around them were exploding, that Soames was "the first Englishwoman photographer to stand bolt upright throughout (an air attack) snapping pictures as if she were covering a golf tournament".
In commemoration of Yom HaShoah, the international day of remembrance for the Holocaust, Soames photographs were exhibited at the Jewish Museum on Fifth Avenue and 92nd Street in Manhattan from May to August 1982.
[3][2] Soames had a strong preference for the Nikon FM2 camera and, in the early 1990s, searched London for examples in the belief it was about to be discontinued.
[5] In 2010 Soames nominated as her Best Shot ever the trio showing Rupert Murdoch in 1981 announcing his purchase of Times Newspapers, flanked by his editors Harold Evans and William Rees-Mogg.
[10] In 1956, she married Leonard Soames, owner of the Snob high street clothing chain, while still a student at St Martins.