Photo credit: Guy Marcovaldi, Projeto Tamar Brazil / Marine Photobank

Marine Photobank sponsors a photo contest with a unique twist, instead of submitting your best marine life shot, this contest is looking for photos that are equal parts amazing and devastating. On the left is last year’s winning photo featuring three turtles caught in a fishing net with a potential rescue in progress (devastating) against a brilliant blue ocean backdrop (amazing).

The contest calls for photographers of all skill levels to compete and donate photos illustrating human impacts on marine life and marine ecosystems as well as photos capturing people working to turn the tide on ocean degradation.

Entering the contest supports ocean conservation because every photo becomes a part of the Marine Photobank database, which was created to make high quality ocean conservation images easily available. Every image in the database can be used at no cost by teachers, students, researchers, conservationists, scientists and other non-commercial users, plus media as well.

So support ocean conservation and enter your photo to win. If that doesn’t motivate you, how about the Grand Prize…a two-person cabin on a 10-day Lindblad Expeditions trip to the Galapagos, pretty sweet.

To find out more about the contest, read about all the great prizes, and learn how to enter click here. The deadline to enter is September 30, 2011. So you still have plenty of time to find the perfect photo on your hard drive or there’s still time to go out and capture a winning photo, because unfortunately there is plenty of ocean devastation out there, it’s just a matter of being there to get the shot.