Underwater imaging specialist and digital artist Jim Hellemn has spent a career bringing the spectacular colors of coral reefs into your home. Using specialized lighting and hundreds of photographs to complete each image, he has spent more than twenty years capturing the stunning beauty of coral reefs around the world. An important aspect of Hellemn’s work is public awareness and ocean conservation.
“Coral Reefs are among the most colorful places on Earth, yet sadly, you can’t easily see one, even if you’re right there.” – Jim Hellemn
Jim’s images offer a unique way to appreciate a part of our environment that very few people get to experience. “As more people make the connection with the ocean as an important part of their own environment”, Hellemn says, “my hope is that they will instinctively want to protect it.” His work has appeared in National Geographic magazine, the American Museum of Natural History and is featured in several public attractions.
Jim Hellemn has been working on ocean imaging since the early 1990s, when he was part of a design team developing a high technology underwater camera system for the Navy. Using blue-green lasers matched to the color of sea water, the team was able to create detailed images of the ocean bottom through 50-100 feet of water. During the following years, Jim developed ways to create mosaics of the laser data and before long came up with the idea of creating a digital mosaic of close-up underwater photography as a way to visualize an entire reef. “When you back up enough to take a landscape shot underwater, everything turns blue and fuzzy because water absorbs all the red and yellow light and obscures details”, Jim explains. To solve the problem, Jim developed his own equipment and methods, using computers to stitch multiple images together and create a seamless panorama.
In 2006, Jim was commissioned to produce a coral reef image large enough to cover the side of a five storey building in Grand Cayman. The resulting image was rendered in tiny, hand-cut Italian glass tiles, and now covers an inside wall of the Camana Bay Observation Tower, where visitors can walk up a coral reef on their way to the observation deck.
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