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Spectras 100 Lagoon Part Deux


spectra

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Thanks! How is yours coming along ?

 

 

Oh slowly. Built the electrical shelf. Picking up my lights tomorrow. You know the usual. I'm trying not to freak out about moving my existing tank across the room.

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I love your ascending wall of zoas and palys!

 

Thanks was actually trying to do one section of zoas only and another with some SPS......well there mixed now so will see how it all works out when they grow together.

 

Still after a few more gorgonians......may even add a little more flat or lower rock behind so I can put a few more things in there. I have a pretty good dead space in the middle of the tank at least 10" or so till the back glass. Having a 30"deep tank is nice.

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I forgot your tank was so deep, you must have all kinds of room on the sandbed compared to a regular tank.

 

Oh yeah :lol: I have a nice area for GSP it cant touch a thing..........all my plates and scolys are in the sand its great.

 

was doing a little feeding tonight.....cant wait to see what I can do with a camera the colors are just to washed out on the plates and the scoly.....

 

IMG_3336.jpg

 

IMG_3335.jpg

 

IMG_3334.jpg

 

and last the dendro......I think this is one of my favorites in the tank. Have had it for a year and now has 4 heads coming off the main stalk now. IMG_3337.jpg

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Added a few new pieces today.............yeah I know some people don't like sticks but I do :P

 

IMG_3362.jpg

 

don't ask the name as I forgot about 2 mins after leaving the shop :lol:

 

And another one.......

 

IMG_3363.jpg

 

Also picked up 3 polyps of scrambled eggs and now have 3 babies popping out.............

 

IMG_3374.jpg

 

Also stopped buy a local vendor and well this is just one of many tanks :wacko:

 

IMG_3356.jpg

 

Hopefully better pics coming soon.........Got a camera from Teeny but need to figure it out :lol: I am a simple person and well time will tell how it all works out :blink:

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Not much right now. I have the purple tang, 5 or 6 chromis, randalls goby, a mini geodsic hawk, starry blenny, opossum wrasse, fairy wrasse and a full size about 3 1/2" fox face in there now. Plus I have a few that could go in from another tank........they were all together at one time in my garage tank.

Any issues with foxface nipping corals?

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Looking good!!!! I like the new stuff!

 

Beautiful corals!

 

Thanks!

Any issues with foxface nipping corals?

 

Nothing yet has been a model citizen in the tank. Its also the biggest fish in there. Also one of the most scared ones in the tank.....walk into the room and it goes and hides.

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My first couple months of pictures with the DSLR kinda sucked, but the more I did it the better it got. Especially once I realized it was OK to take like a hundred pictures just to get three decent ones. It's not like it costs money to take more pictures :P

 

But if you've only used a cell phone camera, there's a big learning curve just in figuring out how to get pictures off the camera, processed, and uploaded.

 

Once you want to move beyond automatic/no flash, try this:

 

Set the lights to photo mode, with whites at the same level as the blues, or even higher.

Set white balance on the camera to automatic.

Set to "A" (aperture priority mode).

Set ISO to 200 or 400.

Set aperture between 5 and 8.

Take a picture. If it's too bright (usually it will be), adjust the exposure down one stop (-0.3). If it's too dark, adjust exposure up one stop.

Try again, see how it looks. Depending on whether I'm doing top down or from the front, I usually have to adjust the exposure as much as +/- 1.0.

 

This sounds like a lot, but once you set it once, the only setting I usually have to change is the exposure.

 

It will be too blue with automatic white balance. There are ways to adjust it with a reference picture in the camera but I've never gotten that to work very well. If you adjust the white balance on the computer it turns out a lot better. It's pretty much the same in all photo editors, tell it to adjust white balance using a selector (in Lightoom it's little eye dropper), and click on something in the picture that should be grey or white but looks blue or purple. Usually I click on the sand if it's in the picture. That usually gets is pretty close, and then I usually adjust the blue slider to make it just a touch more blue.

 

Finally, adjust the exposure in the photo editor up or down so that it looks right to your eye.

 

If you take pictures with the camera saving as JPG, you'll get JPG files from the camera that can be viewed or uploaded without using an editor. That's a good way to go to get started since it's simpler and you don't have to mess with them. When you start using a photo editor, you can make limited adjustments with JPG files.

 

When you get more comfortable, start saving the pictures as unprocessed RAW files. You can fix the white balance much better that way, as well as the exposure and everything else.

 

When I first started doing this stuff it was really intimidating and I thought it was going to be way to hard to do it all the time. But after a couple weeks spent trying things and reading the manual and doing some Googling, it got way easier. Now I can set up the camera in about five seconds, and then about another five or ten minutes to do the stuff on the computer before it's ready to go on Flickr and posted on NR.

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My first couple months of pictures with the DSLR kinda sucked, but the more I did it the better it got. Especially once I realized it was OK to take like a hundred pictures just to get three decent ones. It's not like it costs money to take more pictures :P

 

But if you've only used a cell phone camera, there's a big learning curve just in figuring out how to get pictures off the camera, processed, and uploaded.

 

Once you want to move beyond automatic/no flash, try this:

 

Set the lights to photo mode, with whites at the same level as the blues, or even higher.

Set white balance on the camera to automatic.

Set to "A" (aperture priority mode).

Set ISO to 200 or 400.

Set aperture between 5 and 8.

Take a picture. If it's too bright (usually it will be), adjust the exposure down one stop (-0.3). If it's too dark, adjust exposure up one stop.

Try again, see how it looks. Depending on whether I'm doing top down or from the front, I usually have to adjust the exposure as much as +/- 1.0.

 

This sounds like a lot, but once you set it once, the only setting I usually have to change is the exposure.

 

It will be too blue with automatic white balance. There are ways to adjust it with a reference picture in the camera but I've never gotten that to work very well. If you adjust the white balance on the computer it turns out a lot better. It's pretty much the same in all photo editors, tell it to adjust white balance using a selector (in Lightoom it's little eye dropper), and click on something in the picture that should be grey or white but looks blue or purple. Usually I click on the sand if it's in the picture. That usually gets is pretty close, and then I usually adjust the blue slider to make it just a touch more blue.

 

Finally, adjust the exposure in the photo editor up or down so that it looks right to your eye.

 

If you take pictures with the camera saving as JPG, you'll get JPG files from the camera that can be viewed or uploaded without using an editor. That's a good way to go to get started since it's simpler and you don't have to mess with them. When you start using a photo editor, you can make limited adjustments with JPG files.

 

When you get more comfortable, start saving the pictures as unprocessed RAW files. You can fix the white balance much better that way, as well as the exposure and everything else.

 

When I first started doing this stuff it was really intimidating and I thought it was going to be way to hard to do it all the time. But after a couple weeks spent trying things and reading the manual and doing some Googling, it got way easier. Now I can set up the camera in about five seconds, and then about another five or ten minutes to do the stuff on the computer before it's ready to go on Flickr and posted on NR.

 

Holy shit its a novel :lol: I will read it all in the morning..............just watched Grimm and ready for bed............getting old sucks ;)

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IMG_3356.jpg

 

Hopefully better pics coming soon.........Got a camera from Teeny but need to figure it out :lol: I am a simple person and well time will tell how it all works out :blink:

 

Whose shop is this? Crazy frags lol. Tank is looking great

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  • 1 month later...
  • 3 weeks later...
On 1/7/2017 at 1:00 AM, Bowen1022 said:

 

Whose shop is this? Crazy frags lol. Tank is looking great

 

Yup I want to know this too, my wife and I are planning a trip (maybe) to your neck of the woods....

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Goldenbasket Reef..............................

 

Many of my zoas and also RFAs came from Rudy................................

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Just now, spectra said:

Goldenbasket Reef..............................

 

Many of my zoas and also RFAs came from Rudy................................

 

Excellent....

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  • 2 weeks later...

Well been a while but the tank is doing great! Added a few more sticks :o and a few other pieces...........stopped by my local dealer today and well came home with a few new pieces...........and a fish.........

 

Here are a few pics but new stuff is floating and needs to be dipped.

 

 

IMG_3558.JPG

IMG_3557.JPG

IMG_3550.JPG

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