14gal Nano Reef Build

[Discus-n00b]

Thanks Barb, like any corner of the hobby there are tons of names and abbreviations for the coral and such. I just copy and past the post off the reef forum so it may not make total sense here haha.

[klannin]

Cool tank. I had a two gallon pico reef but after i had my first child I had to take it down.

[Discus-n00b]

Thanks! I've never had a big reef, always enjoyed the smaller ones more.

[Discus-n00b]

Some new ones here. Been through a number of issues lately. I slacked off on WCs, nutrients caught up with me and caused a huge algae issue. Then my alk and cal started playing games. Finally getting things stable again. Lost 1 frag through all of it but everything else seems to be responding fairly well. Finally seeing new growth after it was stalled. Took out most (working on all) of my substrate to keep nutrient issues down and cranked up the vortech. Cut back on the lights and feeding as well. Here are some shots from today, lemme know what you think. Colors are still coming back in the coral.

[trungnguyen]

Very nice. I have had some issue with nitrate and phosphate too. Have been dosing the red sea phosphate reducer to control the algae too. Everything is good now.

Trung

[rickztahone]

I really love those clown fish! Those were some of my favorites from the link you posted last time. TFS

[discuspaul]

Matt, your strikingly awesome photos have made me start to seriously consider re-trying my hand at a nano reef tank.
It's been many years since I was into marine and I'll need to refresh my knowledge.
Any suggestions for a real good saltwater forum website ?

[Discus-n00b]

Matt, your strikingly awesome photos have made me start to seriously consider re-trying my hand at a nano reef tank.
It's been many years since I was into marine and I'll need to refresh my knowledge.
Any suggestions for a real good saltwater forum website ?

Thanks. I really like nano reefs. Its a good challenge. People say you can't be sucessful with a nano and SPS, i said hogwash and did it anyway. Love the look and love seeing those doubters come around in the end. I personally prefer Reef2Reef.com. Nice people and good info. Reefcentral is more advanced but the people are mehhh. Lots of snobbishness. I'd read both, I'd post on Reef2Reef. Nano-Reef is iffy IMO as well, I guess its ok/pretty good if you stay out of the Lounge.

[discuspaul]

Thanks for the info, Matt - much appreciated.

[Discus-n00b]

New FTS from tonight. Not a lot has changed, like I said I scraped a lot of the coraline especially off of the sides. Not tons of noticeable growth, you can see some on the retina blaster in the back left, Hawkins beside it, Cali tort upper right, and the Slimer in the middle. If you notice the dead area on the underside of the slimer are closing back up as well, good sign. I still have yet to mount any more frags, doing that soon I promise. I want to eliminate the white frag rack on the front. When I took out my sand it forced me to put it in to hold the frags that were on the sandbed. Have a few frags I'm probably going to trade locally for other stuff on my wishlist....or sell and thin the stock we'll see. I have duplicates of a few things up there on the racks. Anyway here are the pics.

[zergling]

Nice tank and journal Matt! Someday I'll eventually give in to the "dark side" and set up a FOWLR tank and maybe some softies later on

Funny, I also have a 15" cube from pico aquariums haha! I'm planning to move my Pseudomugil 'red neon' and hastatus cories there....but now I'm starting to think of ideas again LOL

[Discus-n00b]

Energizer bunny......stillllllll going! Need to get some new pics of the tank and coral but I have to glue a few more pieces to the rock either today or tomorrow. Much to my dismay its getting closer to the time I frag the Green Slimer, the thing is a beast. We'll see might just let it go until I HAVE to do it. I added a HOB refugium instead of my HOB Aquaclear yesterday. Chaeto and some new CUC come tomorrow. It allowed me to clean up the display and move the ATO back there and get the skimmer tubes out of the tank, especially the locline return as it was blocking light at the back of the tank. Moved the heater back from the aquaclear to the refugium as well.

I did get a couple photos of the fish though.



And the ever elusive Tailspot. The tort behind him is washed out due to the flash, its really solid blue/purple.

[rickztahone]

...

Matt, this may be one of my favorite fish pics ever! The detail is so clean and crisp! Super sharp man. My only wish was that it was me that took it

That tailspot isn't bad either, but I was awed by the first one.

I thought of you 2 days back. I went in to the LFS looking for sump ideas and all the SW tanks were sumped but all the FW all had cheap HOB's. I was like, "what the heck man? FW needs some good filtration too!" lol.

[Discus-n00b]

Ricardo thanks! I've been saying for the past few days this may very well be the best photo I've ever taken....or favorite at least. I really really like it. Very happy with it. Didn't take much post processing at all, thats when you know its good. The white on the head is slightly blown out I feel like but Its really not enough to bother me with the rest being so good. I've been debating whether to print this one (canvas/aluminum) for the past 2 days.

Actually makes me want to get more photos of the clowns haha. Finally put the flash over them and played with it a while and that's the result.

[rickztahone]

You can try burning on PS with roughly 3-7% Opacity to try to correct the highlight area, but it doesn't bother me one bit. How much did you crop here? Would you be able to print a 8x10 or better yet, a 13x19 from it?

I don't know why but one of those metal sheen prints came to mind when I saw this one. It would be an absolute shame to not get this printed, it is simply a stunner.

Here's a few tips I can give you:

-if you are viewing your shot straight on (monitor), stand up, and look at your shot from above the monitor down. You will notice that you can see a lot more detail on the top section of the fish. When you print, this section will be a little more visible. However, you will also see a few bits of the area right above the fish that aren't completely black. I suggest you tidy up these sections so that if you print, it will be on straight black.

-You left in some minor distractions on the right side which can easily be cloned out.

-I'm not sure if you have noticed on many of my shots I will completely black out surroundings, especially on shots like these where the surrounding environment is already very dark and it seems to transition to pure black anyways.
What you can do is use the selective tool and select the fish completely out of the photo. However, I can already see some trouble spots on the bottom right Where that would be kind of difficult. There are a few ways you can deal with this, if you want me to go the hard route on PS and going back and forth with Bridge, I can, but if not, you can simply take the add on tool, which I believe is the lasso tool, and keep adding by holding the shift key. This will add to your selection. If you hold alt key, it will remove. This way you can select pricisely what you want and nothing else. You can feather your edge through "refine edge" tool and then keep a bit of the surrounding so long as it isn't a color that is contaminating. You can click decontaminate colors for this too though.

Sorry, I went off in a bit of a long winded step by step, but the shot is already spectacular, and a few things here and there can get you an awesome print on your wall.