2nd Place Underwater Digital Art
Conor Culver
“Living Fossil“
The Story:
The Nautilus has been around for 500 million years and have barely changed throughout all of those years. While the world changed around them, they remained the same. To reference this amazing fact, I took my image from my dives in Palau of a nautilus and blended it together with an image of an actual fossil of a pre-historic nautilus shell. The past and the present nautilus together, a living fossil. To represent the passage of time, I took a star trail image in Kremmling, Colorado and put it into a lake image taken at night at Wellington Lake, Colorado. The stars will trail like this with long exposures because of the rotation of the earth and thought that this was a perfect way to show the passing of time for this image.
Location:
Palau, Micronesia
Equipment Used:
- Camera – Nikon D800E
- Housing – Ikelite
- Strobe/light – 2 DS160 Sun Strobes
- Lens – Nikkor 60mm Macro for the Nautilus. Background image (both the lake and star trails) was taken with 14-24mm Nikkor Wide Angle Lens. The nautilus fossil was photographed with 28-300mm Nikkor Lens. I used Photoshop to blend the images together all by hand, no AI.
Camera Settings:
- ISO 100
- F/14
- Shutter speed 1/160s
