Whales Have No Secrets From S.D. Underwater Photographer

Flip Nicklin was submerged in icy water among a group of narwhals when one of them suddenly turned and pointed its nine-foot-long tusk directly at him.

Nicklin could feel clicks from the 3,000-pound whale’s echolocation system pulsing on his chest, and he began to think uneasy thoughts: that he had gone too far this time, that he had inadvertently violated some natural code that he might now have to pay for with his life.

But instead of attacking him, the narwhal turned away and resumed a bloody battle with other male narwhals nearby. Nicklin continued to photograph the rare Arctic whales, and when he surfaced a few minutes later, he not only had the first underwater pictures of narwhals fighting each other, but had all of his organs and limbs intact, too.

“In that situation you just hope you haven’t screwed up” by trying to get too close to the animals, Nicklin said. But nagging fear is just one of the inconveniences the 38-year-old photographer has put up with in 10 years of photographing whales all over the world.

Most photographers take pictures of whales when the giant mammals appear briefly on the ocean’s surface. Nicklin specializes in photographing whales underwater.

He has taken pictures of blue whales near Sri Lanka and right whales off the coast of Argentina. He has dived with gray whales near Vancouver Island and has stood on the ocean bottom near Hawaii as humpback whales floated upside down in the water above him, singing their powerful, haunting songs.

His photographs appear regularly in National Geographic and include many photographic “firsts.” His pictures often are beautiful or awe-inspiring, but they are also scientifically revealing: They show how whales look in their natural environment.

“The idea is to photograph a whale doing something it would be doing if you weren’t around,” he said.

Nicklin, a native San Diegan and Clairemont High School graduate who now lives in La Jolla, learned to scuba dive when he was 14. As a young man he worked as a diving instructor at the Diving Locker, a Pacific Beach retail store owned by his family.

But taking pictures of oceangoing mammals the size of recreational vehicles was still a long way from his mind when a couple of photographers from National Geographic signed up for his diving course in 1972. Four years later, he served as a diving instructor on a National Geographic expedition to the Leeward Islands.

“But I still didn’t want any part of photographing whales underwater,” Nicklin said. “It seemed crazy.”

Prolonged exposure to both photographers and whales changed his mind, and after serving as an assistant photographer on several National Geographic assignments, he began working for the magazine on his own.

Since then, Nicklin has taken underwater photographs of a dozen species of whales, including killer whales and baleen whales such as gray whales and humpback whales. But his favorites are sperm whales.

“Baleen whales are great, but they’re weird-looking,” he said, referring to the huge, grotesque plates that baleen whales use to strain small fish and crustaceans from the water. “Sperm whales have teeth--it’s like Moby Dick come to life.”

Part of his affinity stems from an encounter he had with a 35-foot female sperm whale near Sri Lanka in 1984.

“I dove under her to get a picture, but she dove, too, and I thought I’d spooked her. But she came back up right next to me.

“I swam up next to her eye--it was wide open--and touched her. There was nothing else to do, so I went down her back sort of scratching it as I went. . . .” That incident resulted in spectacular close-ups of the huge creature swimming near the ocean’s surface.

Nicklin conceded that the first few times he got into the water to take portraits of whales, he was intimidated by their enormous size. “Now it’s not terrifying at all, but there are moments” that are uncertain if not downright hair-raising, he said.

“They’re so big, they have the potential to mess up and do something to you without even trying. . . . You never really know what’s going to happen. But I figure if the animal isn’t doing something weird or aggressive, I’m probably all right. Most of the time I’m more concerned about getting a good picture.”

Nicklin takes most of his pictures near the surface, but he once dove to a depth of 130 feet to photograph singing humpback whales off Lanai, in the Hawaiian Islands. Humpbacks assume an unusual posture when they sing, hanging upside down in the water with their pectoral fins out and their tails at or near the surface, and Nicklin and a partner got the first shots ever of the singing whales--from beneath them.

The humpbacks’ songs consist of powerful whistles, screeches and hums. “You can feel it as much as hear it,” Nicklin said, “especially when you’re in the water underneath them. It’s like being inside a kettle drum.”

Some scientists speculate that humpback whales use the songs to communicate with other whales over long distances. Nearly all whales use some form of echolocation--a kind of natural sonar--to locate and identify objects in the water, and Nicklin said many of the squeaks and clicks can be heard by human ears.

“It’s hard to describe, . . . but if they’re close, you can actually feel the pulses in the air spaces in your chest,” he said.

One of the few things Nicklin hasn’t done is photograph gray whales at lagoons in Baja California, where the whales go each winter to give birth to their young. But he’s not chagrined about it--scores of other photographers have been there, and Nicklin is more interested in “the chance to go somewhere where no one’s ever been, do something that hasn’t been done.”

His relationship with National Geographic--a magazine that values photographs highly--allows him to do that. A single assignment from the magazine means at least six months’ worth of paychecks for Nicklin, which enables him to stay for a long time in remote locations until he has obtained the pictures he wants.

For instance, in 1985 National Geographic sent him to North Baffin Island in the Arctic to photograph narwhals, one of the least-known whales in the world. Narwhal tusks were traded as unicorns’ horns in the Middle Ages, and, as author Barry Lopez has noted, even today scientists know more about the rings of Saturn than they do about these 15-foot-long whales. Narwhals have never survived in captivity for long.

For four months, Nicklin and his Indian guides camped on sea ice each night and used kayaks to search for the elusive whales during the day.

“We wound up getting 90% of our photos on the last day we put the kayaks in the water, when we found a group of male narwhals fighting. It took us four months to get lucky for a day,” Nicklin pointed out.

Diving in the 28-degree water was made possible by a “dry suit,” which Nicklin described as a waterproof pair of overalls. Insulation against the cold is provided by a thin layer of air between the diver’s body and the suit.

Even so, a single dive “lasts only about 40 or 50 minutes,” he said. “Your hands get so numb you can’t pull the trigger on the camera.”

But freezing water isn’t the toughest part of photographing whales, according to Nicklin. Even spending only 12 weeks a year at his La Jolla home is something that he has more or less gotten used to.

The toughest part is getting close to the whales without spooking them. What he wants are portraits of whales behaving naturally underwater, but the animals “often react to your presence, and there’s a big difference between behavior and reaction,” Nicklin said.

For that reason, he plans to make increasing use of remote cameras. By fastening a camera to a boat or ice flow, Nicklin can sit unobtrusively on the surface and snap pictures of the ocean below. Sophisticated video equipment allows him to constantly monitor any whale activity within view of the camera.

“That will be the way I work more and more in the future,” he said. “I want to do good journalism with whales.”