Salty's 125

jroovers

jroovers

Super Active Member
Joined
Aug 29, 2012
Location
London
Glen, I think your tank looks great in person, better than the photos.  You don't see too many tanks that are as long as yours (or appear that way anyway), neat to see the fish go from end to end. 

Salty Cracker link said:
I said to my wife after he left \"oh man, you know you've arrived when he shows up to take pics of your tank\".  Even her \"you're a geek\" didn't deflate me that day. I can finally see things I had no idea were there with my old eyes.  \"hey there are polyps on my sps\" I was thinking as I looked at them :) 
Click to expand...

Lol, my wife says to me "Now you're taking pictures of others people's tanks too?  You're such a [fish] nerd".  That is what we are collectively referred to, fish nerds, not reefers. 


Duke link said:
totally, you need to bust out the pringles lid and use it to get your white balance.
Click to expand...

I just set my body to colour specific WB, 10,000k, and it is close enough.  The rest I do in lightroom.  I'm too lazy to custom WB, and I found in the past 10,000k is a lot of times closer even after going to the trouble.  It is nice to shoot your own tank because you can save your settings either in camera, or in post, or in both. Doesn't do you much good though when shooting someone else's tank, unless they have identical lighting.  I found with the LEDs there seems to be a lot of variation in spectrum colour within one shot - maybe this is sort of due to a spotlight effect of two or more different spectrum LEDs casting "spots" of colour on a coral in the same shot.  You can sort of see that in the shot of Glen's nauti spiral monti, as well as the shot of his duncun colony (which came out more blue than I would have liked).  I found that I was making specific adjustments to each individual picture to try and counter that effect.  Duke maybe you've come up with a better process, your shots certainly look great in terms of WB/lack of washed out areas. 
 
Salty Cracker

Salty Cracker

Administrator
Staff member
Website Admin
Joined
Mar 10, 2012
Location
Rocky Mountains BC
The spotlighting effect is definitely there...moreso in the shots we had 100% lighting on.  Normally, during the day, whites would be on 75%, and UV's don't come on until later, but blues are on morning to night.  So under the blues things would be more uniform, but, well, blue.    With whites cranked to 100%, and I use optics to increase par, you're going to get spotlighting.  That's specifically why I removed the red LEDs.  The fish would swim through these spots of red and go freaky colours right before your eyes, and you could see red discs on the rocks.  I think if they were properly diffused they would add a bit of colour, but for me, I just yanked them and added more UV/violets. 
 
D

Duke

Distinguished Member
Website Affiliate
Joined
Sep 20, 2011
I just set my body to colour specific WB, 10,000k, and it is close enough.  The rest I do in lightroom.  I'm too lazy to custom WB, and I found in the past 10,000k is a lot of times closer even after going to the trouble.  It is nice to shoot your own tank because you can save your settings either in camera, or in post, or in both. Doesn't do you much good though when shooting someone else's tank, unless they have identical lighting.  I found with the LEDs there seems to be a lot of variation in spectrum colour within one shot - maybe this is sort of due to a spotlight effect of two or more different spectrum LEDs casting \"spots\" of colour on a coral in the same shot.  You can sort of see that in the shot of Glen's nauti spiral monti, as well as the shot of his duncun colony (which came out more blue than I would have liked).  I found that I was making specific adjustments to each individual picture to try and counter that effect.  Duke maybe you've come up with a better process, your shots certainly look great in terms of WB/lack of washed out areas. 
Click to expand...

i use lightroom also, with my specific camera lightroom cant process the custom white balancing when shooting raw, if i use the canon software it shows up "as shot" in RAW mode, for this reason i stopped shooting RAW (for my tank) and just use jpg, this way the camera embeds its white balance interpretation into the photo and comes out "as shot". since your shooting a higher end body i would imagine lightroom does a better job with rendering RAWs from it as opposed to my camera, thats what i''ve read online at least. But with that said, i do have white balancing down to a quick 1 minute operation on my camera, which i think has all the similar menu settings as all newer canon dslrs. Heres the process i use, once you do it once or twice its super easy and super quick. it works wonders for any tank too, not just LED lit. So for me lightroom cant process RAW photos from my camera correctly. canon photoshoot or whatever it is does however work fine with RAW images, so i just shoot high quality jpg. when i get to post processing, i really dont touch the white balance at all, because the camera takes care of it perfectly, i do adjust things like sharpness, shadows, highlights, black and whites. hope that helps anyone whos shooting a canon and wants to fool around a little next time they get it out. My wife calls us all fish nerds too.. sometimes i think she knows that i know she is right... lol  ;)


1 Camera in FULL AUTO/Flash OFF
2 depress shutter, but dont take the shot.
3 flick to MF
4 hold WB filter over lens. (pringles lid, for me)
5 take photo
6 switch to M mode (or AE or whatever manual mode you shoot)
7 goto menu > custom white balance
8 choose blurry photo you just took with the filter
9 shoot photos (theres also a white balance fine adjustment and i usually add back in +1 or +2 blue.. to get it back to a realistic look)
 
Salty Cracker

Salty Cracker

Administrator
Staff member
Website Admin
Joined
Mar 10, 2012
Location
Rocky Mountains BC
Just a few updated shots... very happy to see that the tank sailed on without me as I got caught up in other things this summer... (sorry yes just using royal blues...)
1.jpg
2.jpg
3.jpg
 
R

Reef Hero

Super Active Member
Joined
May 27, 2012
Location
Lucan
Looking great glen!! Things are filling in nicely :)
You still that granulosa?

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top