About the Project

"Once I'd decided it could be done, it became a personal challenge to do it." Jim Hellemn

The Bloody Bay Wall Mural is a life-size underwater image 20 feet in height and more than 60 feet wide. The image is a photo-composite of over 280 individual frames and the resulting digital image is over five gigabytes - equivalent in resolution to an image photographed on 20 x 24 inch film. The project was conceived and executed by San Diego photographer and entrepreneur Jim Hellemn. Completed over a 14 month period, the effort included the development and testing of specialized underwater photo equipment as well as new lighting and imaging techniques. Research and development was done in San Diego. A test mural was photographed in California's Channel Islands. The Bloody Bay Wall mural was photographed in July 1999 over a two week period by a three man dive team and the charter boat crew.

The following is a personal account of the Bloody Bay Wall mural project by photographer Jim Hellemn.

The concept of the Bloody Bay Wall project began a few years ago as a blur of unfocused musings about the possibility of creating a life-size photograph of a large underwater scene. Over time those ideas grew into a realization that it really could be done, resulting in a challenge to myself to actually do it. The ideas started to flow back in the winter of 1993 when I dove several sites at Little Cayman Island on a dream trip with my wife Karen. I visualized the trip as an opportunity for me to share with her the wonderful things I have experienced underwater, but instead I myself was awestruck by the beauty of this place, the incredible terrain and the dense marine life that seemed to go on forever.

Taking photographs trying to capture some of the dramatic scale of the scenes I beheld, I was confronted head-on by the limitations that make photographing a wide area underwater virtually impossible with conventional photo equipment. Underwater strobes provide adequate lighting for only a few feet of coverage and most of the color spectrum except blue-green is absorbed within 6-8 feet. In addition, looking through more than a few feet of even the clearest ocean water seriously obscures the detail in a wide area image. Over the next few years I came up with a few ideas about lighting and a method of constructing a high resolution composite image of a wide underwater scene.

Around the time I first visited the Cayman Islands, I was in the start-up phase of building a digital imaging business that eventually developed many of the capabilities that would be required to actually pull off a project like I had imagined. A growing arsenal of high powered computers and other imaging equipment were used in my graphics company to produce digitally printed murals as large as to 20 ft by 50 ft, and we continued to improve the quality of reproduction.

© 2000 Jim Hellemn, all rights reserved. Written permission required to use any content of this page.