Rangefinder Magazine
May 2006

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Darwin Wiggett LARRY SINGER
Recreating the Natural World

Lightning Storm and Prairie Highwway, Alberta, Canada.

“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination,” said Albert Einstein. “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

Canadian photographer Darwin Wiggett, 44, is a creative genius blessed with an abundance of both imagination as well as knowledge. But to label Wiggett as simply a photographer, is akin to speaking of Einstein as a guy who worked with numbers.

With Wiggett, as is the case with many brilliantly ingenious individuals, the end result is imagined first; then, whatever tools are required are employed to produce the final finely-crafted outcome.

To drive this point home, on Wiggett’s website, among a list of pages a visitor can examine, one page is labeled “Equipment.” On that page, Wiggett gently teases the curious by writing, “No, I am not going to list all the equipment I use and own. Who cares? Great photos can be made with any brand or type of camera—it is not the gear that makes the photos but the photographer.”

Bear Truth

In his youth, Wiggett was far more enamored with arctic creatures than artistic creativity. “When I was a kid I always wanted to be a forest ranger,” Wiggett says. “I thought forest rangers just worked with animals. As I got a little older, I thought I’d be a biologist, because biologists get to spend all their time in the field hanging out with critters. I just wanted be a Grizzly Adams type and hang out with bears.”

To fulfill this dream, Wiggett went to the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta and became a wildlife biologist specializing in animal behavior.

“I soon discovered that I was only spending about four months in the field and about eight months analyzing data, writing papers and trying to get money by writing proposals,” Wiggett recounts. “While I was doing my thesis, everybody gave slide shows to talk about their research. So I picked up a Canon AE-1 Program with a 50mm lens and that was the start of my photography career.”

Getting in the Mood

Being a “type A” personality, Wiggett reasoned that if he picked up a few books, he could figure out how this photography thing worked.

“I got a book called Photography of Natural Things by Freeman Patterson,” he says. “It opened a world to me that was well beyond documentary nature photography. Patterson’s pictures had a lot of mood and emotion. I thought, here’s a guy who’s taking pictures of nature, putting his personality into it, and probably making money at it. I took pictures for my thesis that were documentary in nature, but in my free time I played around photographing everything in sight, from soap bubbles in the sink and patterns in the carpet, to all the stuff out in nature. So I learned about light and design just by going out and doing it.”

As Wiggett was winding down his thesis work, he taught part time at the university and decided he would try to make a go of photography. “I only had about three days of part-time work each week, and the rest of the time I got to play around developing my skills as a photographer,” he says. “In 1990, I joined a stock agency. A couple years later, I went full time and I’ve been doing it ever since.” As someone obsessed with quality, Wiggett began his professional career using medium format gear. Recently, however, he made the switch from film to megapixels.

“Up until the last few months, most of my landscapes were made with a Mamiya 645 Pro-TL,” Wiggett explains. “My favorite lens on the Mamiya was a 35mm, which is probably equal to about a 19mm lens on a 35 mm camera. I’m a wide-angle guy with landscapes and kids and dogs. I think the reason I like the wide-angle so much is I like to connect with the subject, and I can really connect well if I’m only inches away from it. I like to be up close and personal with my subjects. If I’m using my Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II, 80 percent of what I shoot is done with the 20mm f/2.8. My next favorite lens is the 70–200mm f/2.8. I use a 15mm fisheye for specialty stuff.”

Laughter Pays

Unlike most nature photographers, Wiggett also understands and captures what it takes to evoke laughter with his work. Having used Photoshop since version 2.5, it is not surprising that Wiggett employs creative software extensively in the vast majority of his seamless images. A perfect example is his picture of a sick frog with an ice pack on its head.

“That frog was a pet,” he says. “My wife and I worked on this shot together. We just wanted to have a frog against a simple background. At first, we thought we’d buy Barbie props, like a little hat and stuff, that would actually fit on her and dress her up. Then we decided to photograph the frog and then photograph, and miniaturize the props.”

Getting the props to fit and look natural however, was not an easy task. “I see a lot of montages where people have used different components from different image sources, taken after the fact, at different times, without being planned first, so quite often they look cut and pasted,” Wiggett says. “So what we did was photograph the frog on a pure white background, with simple lights, one on either side of the frog at 45 degree angles. We had the idea for the shot beforehand, so we went out and found an ice pack. We wanted one that had the same color as the frog, so we picked one that has little green dots on it. Then, using the same backdrop, we photographed the ice pack and the thermometer in the same light as the frog.”

To make the ice pack look real, Wiggett photographed the frog first, so he had an accurate image of the shape of the frog’s head. “We wanted to have the ice pack look like it was actually sitting on the frog’s head, rather than having that cut and paste look,” Wiggett says. “So I took some green Play-doh, made a model of the frog’s head, then put the ice pack on it and photographed the ice pack on the Play-doh. I picked green Play-doh so the color cast from the shadow on the bottom of the ice pack would be the same as the color cast from the frog.”

Wiggett then photographed the thermometer using a green card off to the side behind it, so it would reflect some green into the glass. “I then used Photoshop to stick the thermometer in the frog’s mouth, and used the Liquify filter to pucker the frogs mouth around it. This shot has been a runaway best seller.” Another shot that sprung from Wiggett’s mind is one of a Border collie with an apple on its head. “I was just thinking of shots I could do with dogs,” Wiggett says. “All of a sudden I thought, if you had a dog that was so trusting it would let you shoot apples off its head, that’s cool. That’s the shot I want.”

First, Wiggett had to find a dog, so he looked in the phone book and found a company called Animal Actors. Fortunately, they told Wiggett they could train a dog to hold an apple on its head.

“I photographed the dog in the trainer’s backyard under overcast light with a 70–200mm lens,” Wiggett says. “I had the slingshot with me, and held it in front of the same lens after I shot the dog. I left the lens focused on where the dog was, so my hand looks blurred and realistic, so It was easy to take the hand from the one frame and drag and drop it into the dog picture.”

For his picture of a dog holding a remote control in its mouth, Wiggett used his wife as the human model in his complex montage. “I had taken pictures of dogs holding things in their mouths, like a newspaper, or a remote control, but I asked myself, why would a dog be holding a remote control,” Wiggett says. “The reason a dog might do that, is it doesn’t like what’s on TV.”

When Wiggett shot the dog, there was no remote in its mouth and no picture on the TV. “We shot the dog, and then shot the remote control in the same light,” Wiggett recalls. “Once again, I used the Photoshop Liquify filter and altered the dog’s mouth. I then used one of my existing cat shots and stuck it on the TV. I blended it in, and if you look at a close-up of the TV you’ll see there are interference lines on the screen that I got by building up a grid of lines, and used the blending mode to get them to look like TV scan lines.”

Road Trip

Two of Wiggett’s nature shots, both of which he is very proud of, are eerily similar both in subject matter and technique, but each evokes completely different emotions. Both show desolate roads stretching into the horizon, but one implies hope, the other, terror.

“The shot of the rainbow is an actual shot,” Wiggett says. “The rainbow was above the road when I shot it using a 35mm lens on the Mamiya. The road, however, was filled with cracks and tar and looked terrible, so I used Photoshop to make that road look more pristine. I did that by using parts of the road that were acceptable, and then rebuilding it by cloning, moving things around and coloring things in. The rainbow was great, but the sky was too pale, so the sky was amplified. The entire yellow line was also manufactured in Photoshop. There was a yellow line on the road, but it was pale and there were chunks missing. I spent a long time building that center line.” For his shot of the lightning, Wiggett virtually created the entire panorama from scratch.

“The white lines on the road were so faded you couldn’t see them, so I had to rebuild them,” Wiggett explains. “There was a lightning storm actually happening, so after photographing the road and the clouds, I followed the lightning storm as it moved west. When it got dark I photographed the lightning strikes and then put it all together. When you shoot for stock, the subjects have to be clean and perfect for people to buy them. I think the reason the lightning image has sold a lot is it’s not only dramatic, but the road is pure. I used the cloning tool again, but by doing that, you get what people call clone stamps. There’s perspective in that road, and if you’re taking something like the pebbles, or the grain of the road far away, you can’t bring it in closer, because of the size of the texture won’t match.”

To overcome that challenge, Wiggett took existing pieces of the road, and using a lasso tool and a two or three pixel blur, grabbed small sections of asphalt and moved them.

“If you do that too much, you get a bunch of patches that look the same,” Wiggett says. “Because the road is lighter in the center and darker towards the edges, I took a patch of asphalt and flipped it, or rotated it slightly, and then lightened it to merge into the road. I then selected the entire white line and used the color picker. I picked white as the color I wanted to drop in, and used the color blending mode so the underlying texture remained.”

In 2005, Wiggett began work on two major projects. “One is a book called Romancing Niagara, which is a landscape book of the Niagara Falls area,” Wiggett says. “It will come out in the spring of 2006. The second book that I’m working on is going to be called Mutts. As far as I know, nobody has yet done a picture book on mixed breed dogs. There will also be a Mutts calendar and Mutts note cards.”

“Each of my images requires hours of picky and finicky work,” Wiggett explains. “But if you don’t take the time to do it, then the final image won’t appear authentic. If it’s not seamless and realistic, it just won’t look right.”

To see more of Wiggett’s photography, visit his website: www. darwinwiggett.com.