Mitten_reef’s WB55.2

[tmc1313]

On 1/20/2023 at 10:41 AM, mitten_reef said:

 

So, this is likely the cause of scoly death. 

One snail “cap” and what looks like a molt from emerald crab claw, both wedged in good inside the scoly mouth trapping a bunch of sand in there in the process. When the flesh was still on, I couldn’t see these two items. When it was half melted, I could see them. And the now clear picture. 

Sorry to hear about the scoly, but good info. for the future. Mine get the substrate on them all the time. I wonder if they're ingesting any and its building up. So far I have no problems, but now I'll watch more closely.

[mitten_reef]

My attempt at doing a Reel video, been keeping my eyes on this goni (the one in the back).

 

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CnxkD13Brox/

[PJPS]

On 1/23/2023 at 12:00 PM, mitten_reef said:

it's ok, my dumbass blasted the tank with flow and sh!t got blown into its mouth..

i've been told that these meaty ones can get indigestion, got all backed up, and died from inside out - even with food!  with stuff that they can't even digest, it was doomed.  my buddy had a mini cerith fell into a trachy - it was a goner for him too.  

 

so lesson learned folks, indigestion kills...your meaty LPS...

Sucks mightily, but a lesson for the rest of us.  It wouldn’t have ever occurred to me that this is remotely a result of too much flow stuffing something in an LPS mouth.  Typing that, I think it may well be an under-considered factor if you have large mouthed coral.

[mitten_reef]

8 hours ago, PJPS said:

Sucks mightily, but a lesson for the rest of us.  It wouldn’t have ever occurred to me that this is remotely a result of too much flow stuffing something in an LPS mouth.  Typing that, I think it may well be an under-considered factor if you have large mouthed coral.

yeah, i nursed that scoly back from near-death, to have it died like this is rather disappointing. well, dead in any ways is disappointing, really.  but at least i still have its friend, and so far that one's looking good (hopefully didn't jinx myself). 

thanks for stopping by. 

 

 

[mitten_reef]

The chalice frags have healed up quite nicely, just in time for the first and biggest swap of the year in MI.  Gonna send these guys for a ride with my LFS. Hope they find new homes, I could use some slush funds for the tank. 
 

BTW, there are those who wonder how the light setting/spectrum affect your photos. Here’s a ‘proof’. Two unedited photos straight from iPhone, top is evening blue, bottom is midday. 
 

so if you’re struggling with getting good photos, just turn up your white or turn down your blues. 

[PJPS]

2 hours ago, mitten_reef said:

The chalice frags have healed up quite nicely, just in time for the first and biggest swap of the year in MI.  Gonna send these guys for a ride with my LFS. Hope they find new homes, I could use some slush funds for the tank. 
 

BTW, there are those who wonder how the light setting/spectrum affect your photos. Here’s a ‘proof’. Two unedited photos straight from iPhone, top is evening blue, bottom is midday. 
 

so if you’re struggling with getting good photos, just turn up your white or turn down your blues. 

It must be the reefbrites throwing mine, which seems fuuny as I largely doubt their usefulness.  My peak is 14k-ish but the reefbrites must alter that more to the camera sensor than my eye 😜

[TheKleinReef]

10 hours ago, mitten_reef said:

so if you’re struggling with getting good photos, just turn up your white or turn down your blues.

Lol I see people always asking about how to get good pics under LEDs. They’d rather buy some orphek filter for their phone camera then spend 5 seconds turning whites up and blues down

[mitten_reef]

8 hours ago, PJPS said:

It must be the reefbrites throwing mine, which seems fuuny as I largely doubt their usefulness.  My peak is 14k-ish but the reefbrites must alter that more to the camera sensor than my eye 😜

Yes, blue led bars can -and will- throw off camera sensor. @jservedio had a very good post on how digital camera sensor works and why it’s hard to take photos of the led-lit tank. Can’t remember where it is, maybe he’ll remember where that post was.

In both of my photos, I had the two blue+ bars by orphek ON still. If I turned it off in the midday shot, the background will be much whiter. I can grab one this afternoon. 

[TheKleinReef]

In a nutshell is cause the blue and purple wavelengths hit the sensor at a weird angle after going through the glass lenses/prism which is where chromatic aberration comes from. I’ve always wanted to make a photography guide for the reef aquarium but I’m so lazy lol. 

 

edit. to clarify. Yes, CA and blue wash are different, but the way moderns sensors handle blue and purple light cause these issues which rarely occur at the same time.

[jservedio]

1 hour ago, mitten_reef said:

Yes, blue led bars can -and will- throw off camera sensor. @jservedio had a very good post on how digital camera sensor works and why it’s hard to take photos of the led-lit tank. Can’t remember where it is, maybe he’ll remember where that post was.

In both of my photos, I had the two blue+ bars by orphek ON still. If I turned it off in the midday shot, the background will be much whiter. I can grab one this afternoon. 

  Here is the post you are talking about:

 

On 12/2/2020 at 3:50 AM, mcarroll said:

Talking about the blue-washed photos.  

 

That's a bug in the camera software's color interpretation.  By design it's supposed to look realistic.  So when it sees a signal with a TON of blue (ie 20,000K) the software amplifies the blue component even more???  Bug.  Then I'm supposed to fix it somehow after the fact.

 

This seems analogous to driving a car with a hole in the muffler....it's annoying (to me and others) and needs to be fixed.  But the "fix" is not me buying duct tape or earplugs...or turning the music up louder.  The fix is to make the car behave like it's supposed to.

 

 

This isn't a bug in the software and your analogy is not apt at all. Your camera isn't some magic box and is only going to make photos as good as you take them and you can only take good photos if you understand what's actually happening. The blown out blue is not a white balance issue and if your photo is blown out blue, it will never be able to be fixed even if your camera could white balance past 50,000K.

 

Think of each pixel on your camera as three buckets that collect light pouring in through your lens like rain - one bucket for red, one for green, and one for blue. You can control how much light comes in by changing your aperture or shutter speed or you can make the buckets bigger or smaller by changing your ISO. White Balance is simply scaling the relative amount of light collected in each bucket to adjust for blue/orange balance (after it's already been collected). Tint does the same thing but adjusts for green/magenta. As long as none of those buckets are entirely full and fill up at a relatively similar pace, your camera has no issues adjusting. The problem is blue LED fixtures have a nice steady stream of green and red light, but a Niagra falls of blue. So by the time your green and red buckets get to a decent level, your blue bucket has been overflowing for half the time  the shutter has been open. WTF is your cameras white balance supposed to do with that? That is on the photographer to make sure none of the buckets are overflowing. If one of your buckets is about to overflow while the others are normal, your camera is going to say "this isn't normal" and is going to adjust as far as it can. Once a bucket is completely full, it's game over for that pixel.

 

An orange lens filter is going to act as sort of an umbrella for your blue bucket. The issue is, it isn't ever close to perfectly sized and is going to affect all your other buckets as well - particularly the green one, but also the red one a bit. Since it's affecting the green bucket so much, your camera has to adjust the tint to make up for it (literally doing the same as WB), but again, your camera has limitations on how far it can go. Another big problem with this approach is that some of the light is just being blocked and your are losing data.

 

The problem is your lights and ability to take a picture while accounting for the absurdly blue lights you now have.

 

This is what pictures coming off of my Camera look like before I ever even adjust the white balance, blue channel, or anything for that matter - they aren't blown out blue and I don't need to use a filter because I understand what's going on:

 

 

 

 

33 minutes ago, TheKleinReef said:

In a nutshell is cause the blue and purple wavelengths hit the sensor at a weird angle which is where chromatic aberration comes from. I’ve always wanted to make a photography guide for the reef aquarium but I’m so lazy lol. 

Chromatic aberration can be an issue, but is resolved by stopping down the aperture. The big issue with taking pictures in an LED lit reef tank is that the blue intensity is far, far more than what your eyes are seeing and your camera is very sensitive to it. LEDs are so narrowly banded in spectrum compared to any other source so even though the light may look the same in your eyes, it looks nothing like that to your camera sensor.

[TheKleinReef]

1 hour ago, jservedio said:

Chromatic aberration can be an issue, but is resolved by stopping down the aperture. The big issue with taking pictures in an LED lit reef tank is that the blue intensity is far, far more than what your eyes are seeing and your camera is very sensitive to it. LEDs are so narrowly banded in spectrum compared to any other source so even though the light may look the same in your eyes, it looks nothing like that to your camera sensor.

once i went mirrorless i have way less problems with CA, even when doing astro photography wide open. I also vaguely remember reading something about modern sensors not being designed to handle blue light as well as red and green, but I don't know if I'm making that up. Like the actual distributions of R G and B sensors aren't idea to handle blue light as the dominate light source.

[mitten_reef]

As promised, here is an unedited photo of the tank with just the two Hydra32HD set at 13500K. 
 

 

ps. To me this is what the tank looks like WITH the two led bars on in person. In person, WITHOUT the led bars, the tank looks nearly washed out by just bright white light. 

[TheKleinReef]

I want whatever that green SPS is in the corner omg

 

[mitten_reef]

1 minute ago, TheKleinReef said:

I want whatever that green SPS is in the corner omg

 

It’s my favorite shade of green. Wild stag, got it when my LFS used to still import boxes of acros from Tonga. Haven’t bothered to figured out the species ID on it. 

I dislike that everyone in the hobby just call any green stag, a green slimer.  Had both side by side at one point, and this isn’t it, very similar shade of green tho, if you need that green pop.  
 

[jservedio]

35 minutes ago, TheKleinReef said:

once i went mirrorless i have way less problems with CA, even when doing astro photography wide open. I also vaguely remember reading something about modern sensors not being designed to handle blue light as well as red and green, but I don't know if I'm making that up. Like the actual distributions of R G and B sensors aren't idea to handle blue light as the dominate light source.

That makes sense since the sensor is way closer to the lens elements on mirrorless compared to a DSLR so the CA will be less noticeable.  But with reef photos blowout issues are 99% because of the royal blue and shorter wavelength diodes and the light meters not meant to handle it.

 

You are correct they aren't optimized for blue-heavy photos. Camera sensors are designed to handle green light best and red and blue not as well. Basically every pixel has 4 photosites - 2 green, 1 red, and 1 blue (there are different designs, but that's the most prevalent) to as closely mimic your eyes as feasible (which are most sensitive to green). Each photosite is actually just black/white and it has a filter painted over it to block anything except the light within the spectrum that corresponds to R, B, or G with a bunch of overlap.

 

Even though the color temperature may be identical and T5, Halides, PC, etc still have a lot of light that falls only on the blue sensor, it's not just a giant peak at exactly 465nm, so your cameras light meter handles them so much better and is able to adjust shutter, aperture, ISO to prevent the blue channel from blowing out. You get darker photos (since it collects less green and red), but it's not totally blown out. The light meter sucks at handling pure blue light at just a single wavelength LED diode. You can manually correct for this by just adjusting the EV down a bit (I keep mine down 1 full stop when I'm at 18kK-ish).

 

@mitten_reef, sorry for hijacking!

[mitten_reef]

1 minute ago, jservedio said:

That makes sense since the sensor is way closer to the lens elements on mirrorless compared to a DSLR so the CA will be less noticeable.  But with reef photos blowout issues are 99% because of the royal blue and shorter wavelength diodes and the light meters not meant to handle it.

 

You are correct they aren't optimized for blue-heavy photos. Camera sensors are designed to handle green light best and red and blue not as well. Basically every pixel has 4 photosites - 2 green, 1 red, and 1 blue (there are different designs, but that's the most prevalent) to as closely mimic your eyes as feasible (which are most sensitive to green). Each photosite is actually just black/white and it has a filter painted over it to block anything except the light within the spectrum that corresponds to R, B, or G with a bunch of overlap.

 

Even though the color temperature may be identical and T5, Halides, PC, etc still have a lot of light that falls only on the blue sensor, but it's not just a giant peak at exactly 465nm, so your cameras light meter handles them so much better and is able to adjust shutter, aperture, ISO to prevent the blue channel from blowing out. You get darker photos (since it collects less green and red), but it's not totally blown out. The light meter sucks at handling pure blue light at just a single wavelength LED diode. You can manually correct for this by just adjusting the EV down a bit (I keep mine down 1 full stop when I'm at 18kK-ish).

 

@mitten_reef, sorry for hijacking!

Dude, I’m just glad you’re dropping your photography knowledge on my thread, cuz I have a hard time remembering where the other ones went, 🤣

[TheKleinReef]

we should start a photography guide thread. with @jservedio's guidance we will become masters.

[WV Reefer]

I thought the title said “an alcoholics journey”. 🤦🏻‍♀️
 

 

 

[mitten_reef]

7 minutes ago, WV Reefer said:

I thought the title said “an alcoholics journey”. 🤦🏻‍♀️
 

 

 

It’s by design/intentional/etc 🤫
 

ps. Just to clarify, I’m just addicted to them acro sticks, not the sauce 

[jservedio]

29 minutes ago, mitten_reef said:

It’s by design/intentional/etc 🤫
 

ps. Just to clarify, I’m just addicted to them acro sticks, not the sauce 

It's 12:58 on a Thursday and we are here instead of actually working. We've all got a problem...

 

34 minutes ago, TheKleinReef said:

we should start a photography guide thread. with @jservedio's guidance we will become masters.

I'd definitely help on that. No matter what, shooting an LED lit reef is hard to get right. It's easy to get passable snapshots, but getting really high quality photos is just plain hard.

 

I'm actually a pretty bad photographer as far as photographers go, I am just able to overcome that with persistence, Photoshop, and taking tons of shots. I've been shooting under my Radion for more than 10 years now with the exact same settings the whole time and I am still pretty regularly off on my exposure by nearly +/- 1 EV after all that time.

 

Of the pictures I posted yesterday, I don't think a single one of the 10 or 15 I took were within 0.5 EV and 2/3 of them had to be tossed and I actually know what I'm doing.  Metering blue LEDs is just not an easy thing to do.

[TheKleinReef]

16 minutes ago, jservedio said:

and taking tons of shots

 

with enough shots there's bound to be one good one.

even a broken clock is right twice a day right? 😄

 

[A.m.P]

2 hours ago, TheKleinReef said:

we should start a photography guide thread. with @jservedio's guidance we will become masters.

I would love to read through something like that.

[mitten_reef]

On 2/2/2023 at 2:30 PM, A.m.P said:

I would love to read through something like that.

@jservedio and @TheKleinReef, you see that?  Time to get working on it, let’s go. 😂

On another note, taking about 10 frags to drop off at LFS today. He’s having a table at a swap/show tomorrow.  @Tom@HaslettMI, make sure to stop by Dutch Family Reef table to check him out if you end up going.  

 

[TheKleinReef]

50 minutes ago, mitten_reef said:

you see that?  Time to get working on it, let’s go.

 

it's in the works!

 

[mitten_reef]

When you go to LFS on the day before a frag swap, cuz you know he’ll have some nice order coming in. 
it has a small rough area, hopefully no big deal 🤞