PixelatedImage Blog

My friend Darwin Wiggett is one of those impossibly talented photographers whose work I can look at for hours. Very different from my own work, his landscape work is gorgeous and always moves me. After yesterday’s post I thought I’d go back to Darwin’s site and spend some time there – particularily looking at the way in which he uses light and time in his images. I stumbled on some things I hadn’t seen before, including a few downloadable PDFs that I want to point you towards. The first is his Paint With Time article, the second his Expose Right article. Check them out HERE. (Warning: Start playing with this stuff and you’ll be ditching your plans to buy that expensive new lens and spending more than you ever imagined possible on ND and ND grad filters. I’m just sayin’…)

Darwin is an excellent teacher and goes into technical details on a level I just never get around to. He illustrates things really well and for the paltry couple bucks he charges for the downloads, it’s money well spent. Darwin’s a kindred spirit – he talks about gear only as it pertains to technique and technique only as it pertains to vision. He’s up there with Bruce Percy at the top of my list of photographers at whose feet I’d like to spend a week learning. Fortunately, Darwin’s got some awesome workshops, books, and articles and is very open about sharing his passion and his knowledge. He’s also featured as one of my profiled photographers in VisionMongers, along with Chase Jarvis, Zack Arias, Karl Grobl, and others, so he’s in illustrious company.

All of this, and my jet-lag, pushed me down to the water’s edge yesterday morning. I sat on English Bay as I do most mornings with a muffin and coffee, and looked at the light. For the rest of the week I’m going to use my jet-lag for good and not for evil and take my little black box and tripod down to shoot the light and the land. One of the perils of vocational photography is that it’s so easy to lose the excitement, but I’ve found mine again and I can’t wait to grab my gear and my coffee, check the tide charts this morning, and go shoot. Can’t wait.