STORY BY KAREN BOSSICK

PHOTOS COURTESY SUN VALLEY CONTEMPORARY ART

Canadian photographer Paul Nicklen’s office is apt to be found in 28-degree ocean water amidst floating pieces of ice as he dives 40 feet deep to capture photographs of a baby whale.

It may not have the comfort of an ergonomic leather upholstered swivel office chair behind a mid-century executive desk. But his willingness to brave 100-mph winds in the Arctic has enabled him to snap evocative photographs of the world’s most enchanting wildlife, while indulging in off-the-chart personal experiences.

“Polar Reflections” was taken by Paul Nicklen in Nunavut, Canada.

He had what he calls a “deathbed moment,” for instance, in the Antarctica as he tried to become the first to film breeding male elephant seals, which can weigh between 7,000 and 10,000 pounds and measure 20 feet from head to tail.

He swam up to one in the water. Mistaking him for a rival, it spent the next five minutes trying to crush him.

Nicklen’s heart beat so fast, he said, he thought it was going to bruise the inside of his chest. But he was saved by an assistant on shore who waved the seal off.

While filming leopard seals, one took his camera and his head into its mouth. But, instead of harming him, it began to nurture him. It blew bubbles in his face and chased away a seal who approached him from behind.

Paul Nicklen said bears don’t like to get their ears wet, but they don’t seem to mind the rest of their body getting wet as the water drops off this bear’s fur like beads.

And it spent the next four days bringing him penguins--first alive, then dead—apparently thinking he wasn’t capable of feeding himself.

“She was determined to figure out why I was there, what I was doing,” said Nicklen, who came away with a shot looking into the mouth of a seal.

Nicklen, who is considered one of today’s most famous nature documentarians, spent the weekend in Ketchum with his wife Cristina Mittermeier, who is an equally accomplished nature and wildlife photographer.

The two greeted fans at Sun Valley Contemporary Gallery, which has been showcasing their work since it opened a few years ago. And Sunday evening the two, who were named National Geographic’s Adventurers of the Year a few years ago, presented a show of their work at The Argyros as they shared about their efforts to take photographs of wildlife and landscapes that will make a bureaucrat sitting in his office in Washington, D.C., care about Planet Earth.

Paul Nicklen and Cristina Mittermeier are headed to Africa to do a shoot following their visit to Sun Valley.

Nicklen’s odyssey into photographing wildlife began when his family moved from Saskatchewan to Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic when he was four. He grew up in an  Inuit settlement of about 100 people without TV or telephones.

“So, there was no reason to stay inside,” he said.

His family embraced the Arctic, he said, showing pictures of campouts in a canvas tent, next to snowmobiles buried in snow.

“When you fall in love with such an extreme environment, what are you going to do in life?” asked Nicklen, who saw his first polar bear when he was 5.

Cristina Mittermeier says that the Arctic and Antarctica are two of the most awe-inspiring places on planet. But they’re also Earth’s most fragile environments, transforming at a pace unmatched anywhere else on earth.

After attending the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Nicklen went to work as a wildlife biologist in the Northwest Territories, studying lynx, grizzly bears and polar bears. He tried paying the bills by guiding tourists to polar bear photo-ops in Churchill, Manitoba, but soon took the plunge to become a photographer in his own right.

He got a tryout as a back-up shooter on a story for National Geographic 34 years ago in 2001 and never looked back, even though it’s meant spending a month camped out on ice eating seal meat waiting for the right light and traversing the seas for five years trying to get pictures of narwhals, which were nearly wiped out by hunters for their ivory.

Nicklen, who was one of the first to take photos of a spirit bear, showed a photo he took of a polar bear sticking its nose through the window of a cabin. He had noticed the bear looking in and opened the window, hoping to get a photo.

“I told it, ‘Hold on--I’ve got to get my light going,’ ” he recounted. “I opened the door and she met me at the door. I had a little power left in my laptop so I held it in one hand so I could get light on her face while I took the picture.”

“It’s an important story to tell,” he added, “Because they’re getting hungry and they’re coming into communities in contact with people.”

Mittermeier has received Emmy Awards for her work on “The Last Ice,” which examines the impacts of climate change in the Arctic and her work with Paul on the “Photographer” documentaries directed by Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. She also has received the Smithsonian Conservation Photographer of the Year Award and the Sylvia Earle Medal, among a long list of awards.

Mittermeier told how she was born in Mexico City into a middle-class Catholic family. She became fascinated with bees in the garden at an early age, but girls then were not encouraged to have a career—they were to focus on getting married, she said.

“My father always brought my brother National Geographic magazines and books about Jacques Cousteau, while bringing me Barbie doll coloring books. So I’d sneak into my brother’s bedroom and read the books when he wasn’t looking. Eventually, I stole the books.”

She finally convinced her father to let her get a degree in marine biology before receiving an associate degree in photography.

She still exhibits the first photo she took, a picture of a woman from one of China’s Tibetan minorities taking her pet goose for a walk on her head in a Chinese street market.

She was a tourist, touring China with her children, but it launched the first chapter of her career in photography as she began photographing people all over the world.

“I learned,” she said, “That people who remain close to the land still know how to survive on this planet.”

As Nicklen tells it, he met Mittermeier in the National Geographic cafeteria. They married and 14 years ago co-founded the non-profit SeaLegacy to uses visual storytelling to highlight climate change and protect marine life.

“If you swallow water at the beach, you think you’re drinking water. But you’re drinking a living broth,” Mittermeier said, illustrating the importance of the ocean and its creatures. “Whales dive down a mile deep and come up and poop and that fertilizes the planet.”

As photographers for National Geographic, they were under enormous pressure to come back with photos, they said. And it was often easier said than done. Nicklen, for instance, once spent 85 days looking for Coastal wolf pups, which he photographed playing with an eagle feather by crouching on the ground at their level.

One time the two were waiting to see the blue whales they’d been sent to photograph. But that just gave Nicklen an opportunity to photography an iconic photo of a turtle half in and half out of the water.

A National Geographic project could take two years, including four months of shooting and going through 50,000 photos to come up with 10 that tell a story

“We’d spend two years on a project, the magazine went to the mailbox and then it was gone forever,” he said.

Now, the two have the largest social media presence of any photographer with 11 million collective followers on Facebook and Instagram for the pictures and commentary they post.

“We’re finding more success for our goal of conservation this way,” Nicklen said. “We can post as much as we want, versus having something come out in the magazine every two years. With National Geographic we were supposed to be a fly on the wall. This way we can become a champion for the things we believe in. We’re realizing the power a photographer can have.”

“The diversity of life on Earth is truly amazing,” added Mittermeier. “How can we get so lucky to live on Planet Earth?”

Mittermeier said it’s getting harder and harder to feel hope, especially for young people.

“But there are a lot of heroes around Planet Earth doing amazing things. Taking action truly fuels hope.”

DON’T she said, follow her acronym for S.E.L.F.I.E.—“Someone else is likely fixing it….eh.”

“Getting involved, getting active is the antidote when you’re worried about the planet,” added Nicklen.