WILLIAM SCULLY (American b. 1967 - ) Photographer William Scully is a photographer who makes his artwork while exploring the natural world. His work has been exhibited extensively in galleries and in solo and group shows in New England, New York, and he recently participated in an invitational exhibition of American photographers in Hangzhou, China. In 2011 he won Nature Photographer of the Year in the International Photography Awards and received a Lucie Award nomination for Discovery of the Year for his underwater color series of water lilies. In addition to photography, William has studied lithography, photogravure, and life drawing at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts. He spent years making photographs in Truro, on Cape Cod, and now resides in Camden, Maine. "These underwater images offer a unique perspective on the traditional botanical study; they have all been captured in small glacial kettle ponds in Truro, on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts. I have studied my subjects through close and repeated observation under conditions varying by hour and day and season. All images were made using a digital SLR camera encased in a protective waterproof housing and only the available natural light. Aside from some slight color corrections and spot removal, these images have not been manipulated. In the series ‘Underwaterlilies’ I explore the reflective undersurface of the water, using color and an eye for simplicity to present the lush sensuality of the natural world." On Microbotanicals:"The process of constructing a photo-micrographic image can be painstaking. Magnified images projected by the microscope directly onto my camera’s sensor show only partial views of my tiny slide-mounted botanical specimens. In order to create an image of the entire subject I must capture a series of photographs of overlapping segments that encompass the whole specimen and then stitch them together using a software program that seamlessly unifies them. And, because of a microscope’s extremely shallow depth of field, there is an additional level of complexity: for each of the overlapping segments I must adjust the microscope focus in tiny stepwise increments to capture a stack of identically composed photographs, each having subtle differences in the areas that are in focus. I use yet another software program to combine the most focused areas of each photograph in the stack into a single, well-focused photographic image. Each final image, made up of hundreds or sometimes thousands of meticulously captured photographs, has the detail necessary for making large format prints."