Catherine Nelson's "Submerged No. 1" depicts a verdant water garden where lilies wind like silly straws toward the surface. But nothing about it is real. It is composite of more than 1,000 images that Nelson spent months combining and manipulating in Photoshop. "You don't know where the original photo is anymore," she says. "I find that really exciting."

Nelson honed her skills working on films like Moulin Rouge and 300. She quit the film business in 2008 after 13 years and has been creating still images using the same techniques. This is the most elaborate yet. "It seems to have taken manipulation to a new extreme for me,” she says.

The idea came to her two summers ago while visiting a backyard pond in Ghent, Belgium, where she lives. Nelson was drawn to the world beneath the surface. “Every time I looked into it I saw something,” she says. “There seemed to be so many compositional options.”

Over the next year, she made more than a dozen visits, taking thousands of photographs each time. She developed a process of submerging herself in the chest-deep water slowly, to avoid disturbing the scene below. She’d use a Nikon D800 in a waterproof case, blindly shooting the lilies from the stalks to the pads. A fast shutter and in-camera flash froze the scene. When her movements muddied the water, she'd move to the other side of the pond.

Nelson merged the images in Photoshop to create seamless scenes. Then she isolated individual elements—foliage, water, and fish—and combined them in different ways, creating layers and textures while played with color and contrast. “It’s kind of limitless,” she says. “You can move things around until you’re happy.”

Creating "Submerged No. 1" took about two months and is a striking celebration of nature. Although she cares about conservation, she isn't concerned with conveying a specific view—let alone being true to science. “It’s more important that it captures the eye,” she says. It definitely does.