The Garden -- Rakies shallow SPS cube

[bubbaque]

Old point and shoot it's a G7 Canon from 2005 or so. I take some pictures with my phone though

I thought you said you used a phone and every time you posted pics I was blown away and wondered how you got such nice pics. Your colors look spot on! Are you using any software or they come right off the camera like that?

 

[Rakie]

I thought you said you used a phone and every time you posted pics I was blown away and wondered how you got such nice pics. Your colors look spot on! Are you using any software or they come right off the camera like that?

Nope, sorry! Some pics are taken with my phone but I bought this point and shoot a few years back for like $40 on ebay.

I'm using photos on Mac for slight editing. The only editing I really do is the auto-tone correction, which makes the overall tone more neutral. I'll adjust the white balance to be more warm / yellow so the pictures aren't just blue and hazy, and I set the black point to about 0.03 which makes photos not look blown out.

with a good phone you can get way better pictures than my older point and shoot. This picture of the neptune bounces was taken by my friends Pixel

The amount of editing I do is pretty light, but if I don't do anything the images are too blue, too blown out, and unnatural.

 

[bubbaque]

I fully understand needing to edit out the blue. I was just curious of your process as your pics always look great.

Your buddies pixel takes great pics!

 

[bubbaque]

Double post

 

[Rakie]

I fully understand needing to edit out the blue. I was just curious of your process as your pics always look great.

Your buddies pixel takes great pics!

yep I gotcha. The more I fiddled with editing the more I realized I only needed a very little bit of it. The biggest offenders are pictures being blown out (having that white overtone), and needing a black point (like setting contrast but less impact on color).

My camera pics up red and green a little too well, so when I touch color I'll often take out just a teeny bit of saturation. Otherwise the only other time I'll touch saturation is if I can't get the blue hue out, and i'll turn up the warmth just a bit.

A long time ago someone annoyed me while trying to buy a coral because of not liking my picture. They kept saying they only bought things they could see -- And it wasn't that my picture was bad. It's that my picture wasn't a coral under 100% blues. That's what they considered "a real picture".. So because of that I bought a camera and worked on taking natural photos. My tank lighting has significantly more white/green/red than most people, especially for an LED lit tank.

I'll have to take pics with my phone and edit with photos on my mac and see what the real difference is. On paper, my cell phone is much better than my 14 year old canon. P&S.

 

[Rakie]

So some news!

Bad news
- pH probe broke
- no pH probe = Calcium reactor not controlled
- Alk spiked to 16 dkh...

Good news
- Calcium Reactors dose so slowly and evenly this spike didn't kill everything.
- Things are still alive.

Definitely bummed it drifted so intensely... But at least everything is fine.

 

[Katrina71]

Good to hear!!!

 

[Rakie]

New pH probe is up, and did a 20% wc to bring alk down. Haven't done a wc in probably 4 months.

Still thankful that the calrx is a calrx, everything would have been dead if it were a doser for sure.

 

[Rakie]

Some years end photos. Couldn't get a good FTS, but I never really can. That said, this might be the worst picture I've taken. Everything came out dark and dull but it's a good growth reference.

Tank is too dark to get a good photo, should have done this earlier

 

[bubbaque]

Very nice! You are going to need a bigger tank here soon.

 

[Rakie]

Very nice! You are going to need a bigger tank here soon.

Def already there. It'll be awhile but my next tank will hopefully be a 180g

 

[sfin52]

That looks amazing

 

[Rakie]

Thank you @sfin52

Oh! I do have a frag tank upgrade coming soon though. It'll give me an extra square foot of space lol. Doesn't sound like much but it's needed for sure.

 

[Rakie]

Dinos hard at work!

Nothing too valuable, but a few more in the tank hanging on. The second one was a healthy frag that died, then the mini colony I took it from melted.

Only sps are getting annoyed by the dinos so far. Thankfully nothing major died.

 

[bubbaque]

Total bummer to see some of them die. Dino’s can be a real pain.

 

[Rakie]

Total bummer to see some of them die. Dino’s can be a real pain.

Yeah. It was a direct results of Fluconazole dosing. It happened before, and I had the classic "this time it will be different" mentality.. To be fair, this time it was different, it's worse!

No biggie, not the end of the world yet.

 

[Crabby48]

The loss is a bummer. Hope to see you get it straightened out sooner then later.

Looking to learn how you deal with it

 

[Rakie]

The loss is a bummer. Hope to see you get it straightened out sooner then later.

Looking to learn how you deal with it

Well the pain of it is, I've dealt with dinos twice and succeeded. The first time I had to throw the sink at it, and finally after 6 months killed it off. Second time I just started what I did the previous time, and it worked well and almost instantly. Third time this hasn't worked like the last time.

As for the cause of dinos -- I didn't know what caused it the first time, the second time I had an idea, the third time I'm positive -- Each time all from dosing fluconazole.

All of this stemmed from getting two invasive pest algaes from a frag plug 2 years ago.

 

[Janci]

Ouch.
It hurts to see coral losses due to dino.
They are hard to fight and I hope you get them fast.

 

[tripdad]

Good luck fighting them! Went through this last year myself, it sucks!