Joe Wigdahl 2/12/20 Joe Wigdahl 2/12/20

Car Collector Danny Irvine for Mazda

Portraits of the vintage Mazda car collector Danny Irvine, for Mazda Motors.

Last year Mazda asked me to shoot some portraits of Danny Irvine, one of Australia’s biggest collectors of rare and vintage Mazdas. It’s great meeting someone who is so passionate about what they do that it sort of seems like they’re just having fun all the time.

Here’s a link to the article from 100 Years of Mazda:
https://www.mazda.com.au/beyond-the-drive/Autumn-2020/what-does-mazda-mean-to-you/

Joe Wigdahl 12/11/18 Joe Wigdahl 12/11/18

AD Campaign: NRMA

We recently worked with Houston Design Group in Sydney to create a range of lifestyle images for NRMA /National Roads and Motorists' Association. Outside of their insurance and roadside assistance programs, they've recently developed partnerships with camping and caravan parks around Australia as well as new phone apps that help travelers and NRMA customers with a variety of tasks. We created a small image library for NRMA around these new products for them that focused on family road trips, travel and app use.

Client: NRMA
Agency: Houston Design Group

Joe Wigdahl 24/9/18 Joe Wigdahl 24/9/18

New Auto / Cars Portfolio

I've been shooting a lot of cars in the last few years with clients like Mitsubishi, NRMA and Subaru and I've finally decided to publish a portfolio of some of my car work. Cars can be pretty fun- the projects usually call on a lot of the things I really like to shoot- big landscape shots, lifestyle and the occasional aerial shots (which used to be out of a helicopter but are mostly drone shots these days).

Joe Wigdahl Auto & Cars Portfolio

Sunset on Lake Gairdner, South Australia

Joe Wigdahl 22/5/18 Joe Wigdahl 22/5/18

Ad Campaign: Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross

A few months ago I shot a bunch of images for Mitsubishi for their new car in Australia, the Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross.

When we did this shoot this was the only Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross in Australia. It has a busy schedule and the only days I had to shoot it just happened to coincide with the Melbourne Cup race in Victoria, which is something of a holy week there. We couldn't find a location scout who was available (i.e. wanted to take time out of the Melbourne Cup festivities to find locations) so I had to go down to Victoria a week early and find my own locations. Because I really didn't know the Victorian countryside I started every morning looking at Google satellite maps for terrain and roads that might have something interesting to shoot on- especially private properties that looked like they had roads on them that we could get permission to use. I would then spend the next 12 hours driving every day combing over every road in that area and then try and contact homeowners that might have a nice road. After driving around 1000kms of small backroads, at the 11th hour I finally found a family that let us shoot on their land. We couldn't have asked for more amazing weather.

To do the aerial shots I worked with Flying Dragon, a drone company that specialises in high-end cinematography. I had experimented with several readily available drones like the Phantoms and the still image quality just didn't stack up for the size we were going to have to use for the stills. We had to use a camera that was over 30 megapixels to satisfy their print needs and the only drones that can hoist up a camera large enough to do that are the heavy duty 8 blade drones that require professional pilots and cost a fortune. The operator was in charge of the flight controls and navigation on one monitor and I controlled the camera gimbal and captures on the other. I have to say, despite the challenges of short flight times due to battery power, I definitely preferred using a big drone to hanging out of the side of a helicopter.

Client: Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross
Agency: Richards Rose Executive
Executive CD: Adam Rose
CD: Liam Hillier

Joe Wigdahl 9/10/17 Joe Wigdahl 9/10/17

Ad Campaign: Mistubishi ASX and Outlander

I recently had opportunity to shoot images of the new Mitsubishi ASX and Outlander in a car campaign for the Sydney agency Richards Rose. I spent a week in Melbourne working on the shoot, shooting alongside a large TVC crew and taking the cars off whenever I had a chance to shoot whatever I could grab. It was a lot of fun and the weather was surprisingly wonderful for Melbourne in the winter.

Client: Mitsubishi
Agency: Richards Rose
Producer: Katie Morton
CD: Christopher Johnson
Sr AD:George Bassiakos

Joe Wigdahl 6/5/16 Joe Wigdahl 6/5/16

New Work: Lifestyle shoot with Justin and Amelia

I've been shooting some new work lately and have been doing some shoots with some of the talent from Bella Management here in Sydney. I had approached Bella Mgmt with some ideas and one of which was about a couple on a roadtrip, dirty and sweaty from days on the road in a crappy car and they're lost in the middle of nowhere. I don't really do very much work that falls into the fashion realm so I tend to want to mess up their hair and clothes and make it feel more real I guess. I was kind of surprised they went for it and ended up loving the shots. Can't wait to do more of these.

Joe Wigdahl 26/3/13 Joe Wigdahl 26/3/13

Subaru Forester 2013- Norway

A few months after shooting the first leg of the 2013 Subaru Forester's trip around the world, AOI Pro contacted me and asked if I'd like to go to Norway to shoot the next leg. I jumped at the chance- I've always wanted to go to Norway and after I moved to Australia I considered the chances of ever going to be close to nil. Even though there would only be 4-5 hours of daylight a day, -20C most days and it would be something like 28-35 hours of travel each way depending on flight times and delays and it would be right before Christmas, I had to go.

2013 Subaru Forester Norway by Joe Wigdahl

A break in the clouds, Norway.

Buried road markers

A long road through the mountains

Frozen lake at dusk.

2013 Subaru Forester Norway by Joe Wigdahl

The crew lost in the fog.

The “Blue Hour”

Aside from my clients who were from Japan, the entire crew and production were Norwegian and I had the good fortune to meet and shoot alongside a motion crew headed by Norwegian D.P.

Jo Eken Torp

. Shooting in the -20°C temp didn't really bother me as I had lived in Chicago for 10 years and had done shoots in colder temperatures than that. The Norwegians had a lovely habit of standing around and eating waffles and cheese toasties and drinking endless cups of filtered coffee on our downtime and that kept us cozy enough. I was more worried about the fact that we were shooting in Norway the week before winter solstice and daylight would be short and it would mean that not a minute of shoot time could be wasted. Most of the time the motion crew had the car so I had to get whatever I could get without bugging them which meant using long lenses and hiding in the woods while cameras were rolling. When I did have the car to myself I would usually get about 10-15 minutes to get as many of my hero shots as I could before they took the car away from me. To make things more challenging, I completely lost my voice for 5 days of the shoot. I would have to whisper hoarsely to my assistant and then he would have to frantically yell something in Norwegian or English to get things to happen while we still had the car for a few precious minutes. Several times we were ready to start shooting when a cloud or some fog would pass by and everything would get totally lost in white. Nothing had edges or shadows and there was no sense of depth whatsoever. It was like being in an infinite outdoor cyclorama and shooting would become useless. Suddenly a cloud might lift and we'd shoot furiously for 5-10 minutes before it was gone again. On the last day of shooting we had an incredible sunny day and got the chance to see the "blue hour" in which the landscape gets a stunning steely-cyan/blue hue just after the sun sets.

My dad's side of the family is Norwegian- that's where the name Wigdahl comes from. We grew up with lots of relatives in the "Yassir, you betcha, I'll bring some casserole to the pot luck!" Scandinavian diaspora of Wisconsin, Minnesota and North Dakota. During the holidays at the Wigdahl's we ate mashed potatoes and meatballs, pickled herring and lefse covered in butter and sugar. My grandparents had little troll figurines around the house and my family drank coffee from the time we woke up to just before bed. We were told that Uff da! was basically the Norwegian all-purpose curse but my Norwegian friends from Norway told me that it's basically equivalent to shouting "Jeepers!" or "Gosh darnit!" But growing up in New Jersey and being of Norwegian descent meant that we didn't really know anybody else who was Norwegian so we took our grandparent's word (and maybe Garrison Keilor's) for what being Norwegian meant.

Aside from the curiosity of knowing where one's ancestors comes from, I think my brother and I were always sort of plagued by the question of "How much of this is my fault and how much is it genetics?" hahaha. Scandinavian music that makes it abroad seems to be either insanely heavy death metal or club music. Scandinavian films tend to favor the silent, expressionless, melancholic hero bathed in dusky blue light. The dusky blue light was true but everyone I met in Norway was really lovely and chipper and constantly offering me a cup of coffee. My assistant did point out that the snowsuit I was wearing while in Norway was the kind of snowsuit that homeless people wear- so that might be a reason why everyone was so keen to offer me coffee and a waffle but I was stricken by generally how friendly the Norwegians were and how perfect their English was and it made traveling a breeze. I kept thinking what a shame it was that I couldn't spend some serious time in Norway to meet more people and to see how this incredible landscape could transform from white to green.

Joe Wigdahl 28/2/13 Joe Wigdahl 28/2/13

Subaru 2013 Forester- Australia

In September I was asked by the Japanese advertising agencies Hakuhodo and Aoi Pro to take part in a year-long project shooting the new Subaru Forester as it began a drive around the world through some its toughest terrain. I shot stills alongside a motion/TVC production headed by the Australian cinematographer Daniel Ardilley with the Australian production handled by Dynamite Productions. I felt pretty lucky to be involved in this production as I knew I was going to be going to parts of Australia that I probably would never get the chance to go see otherwise and I'd be able to go up in a helicopter to get some great views of the incredible Aussie outback landscape. We first shot in a rather desolate spot outside of Broken Hill, where all the old Mad Max films were shot. While we were shooting we had to endure temperatures of 38°C and higher and the only things that seemed to occupy this blazing landscape aside from the occasional dry shrub were flies. Lots and lots of flies. It was my first time out in the real desert of the outback and I wasn't prepared for how that fine red dust gets into everything, so I spent most of my downtime when I wasn't shooting cleaning my camera and lenses. On our shoot in the Flinders Ranges we were climbing hills in 4x4s so steep that we ran the risk of flipping backwards. I still remember our location scout telling us before we had to drive up the longest, steepest hill of the track to get to one of our locations, "You have to commit to it and go forward and not stop. If you hesitate or stop, you will roll backwards and probably die. You'll also probably kill whoever is behind you." Nice. I don't tell my wife about those parts of the job.

Still, I had a blast shooting alongside a fantastic crew and production team and I enjoyed working with my clients so much that it inspired me to start learning Japanese. They were happy enough with my work on the Australian production that they brought me out to Norway in December to shoot another leg of the Forester's journey around the world. (I'll post images from that in a week or two.)

Subaru Forester, Australia, photography by Joe Wigdahl Photography

Subaru Forester, Australia, photography by Joe Wigdahl Photography

Joe Wigdahl 24/4/12 Joe Wigdahl 24/4/12

Mazda BT-50 Shoot: Zoom Zoom Magazine

Last month I was asked by the UK's Redwood Media Group to shoot a story featuring Mazda's new BT-50 model for its award-winning online presence, Zoom Zoom Magazine. They wanted to tell a story about a day in the life of a BT-50 owner with a natural, reportage feel- showcasing its versatility by following the owner through rough terrain, a surf trip, a trip to the zoo "glamping" (glamorous camping) with his nieces and capped with a night out on the town.We had a looonngggg shot list for the 2 day shoot and I was working alongside Jefferson Grainger, from Corporate Video Australia, who was shooting the motion segment of the piece for the web. Working alongside a motion crew on the same production can be pretty challenging for a still shooter because it can significantly cut into the time there is to shoot- especially if the motion crew is shooting sound or if they don't want to give time to the still shooter (which happens a lot). Thankfully that wasn't the case in this shoot as Jefferson and I both realized that we were going to have to really work together to make sure that each of us got what we needed and it was actually a lot of fun bouncing ideas off one another as to how to get as many good shots as we could in the time that we had. The client was really happy with the results and I just finished shooting a second feature in Sydney for Zoom Zoom Magazine last week. I've included the tears and just a few of the images from the shoot here.