March Meeting Recap

[kokaneejr]

O.K.

For all you who dared miss out on the great host wonderful frags and good eats not to mention a Demo on how to take better tank photo and get them posted on this site....Here is a Quick recap.

Once again Thanks to our President Ken aka Reefbass who hosted and harvested and allowed construction in his house.

The meeting started out with a Demo from Ken on taking better photos and posting them on this site.

Ken showed us how to set up the camera and connect to his laptop in order to get better focus. Good hints were to shoot straight through the glass as any angle will distort the image. Watch your F stop and film speed and shoot with a remote or timer as to not shake the camera.

Here you see Ken's camera connected to his laptop ready for the shot.

Remember to keep you camera pointed straight ahead.

Once you obtain an image get it on your computer to work on the white balance, sharpen adjust what you like(in my case try and work around being red/green color blind) and resize so you can send it to a online photo hosting site like Photo buck.. or Flick..

Then copy the image code and enjoy on Reef Central!!:lol2:

Then we enjoyed a bunch of food and swapped stories of success and failure and proceeded to try and get ken as messed up as possible so he would got to his beautiful tanks and hack away. It must have worked as he harvested many frags form his beautiful Frag tank

and some from the display where this Gramma wondered where some of his hiding places went.

After a succesful raffle for all except Treesmoker who proceeded to whine about all the stuff he should have won:frog: We watched and gave advice( hopefully good) to shaneh who began putting together his hood for his next tank which we might see next month. I will let Shane update you an that.

Sorry we missed you guys and a big Thanks to Ken for another Fun time....

 

[Grant W]

Nice recap Craig and thanks again Ken for everything. Grant

 

[shaneh]

Craig-
that was good and thanks again to Ken for a good informational meeting.

To update you all on the hood i got it all wired up late last night. I was a total of three ballasts, ice cap 660 and two workhorse 5 ballasts. I got it done but it was a lot of wires ran all over the top. I went with 5 T5 on each side instead of the original plan for 4! So no empty space except the spot i am going to put my moon lights.

I'll go into more details when I do the full build thread. I've got tons of pics. It wasn't that hard to do the T5 just very time consuming. I'd say it took me about 3-4 hours to do all ten T5's and the VHO. Also I had a few small problems; first the ice cap ballast after I was done hooking it all up would light up then turn off very fast. So just blink the lights. I knew they had power, I tried it a few more times and it kept doing it. After a bit of research on line I went back a check all connections. The VHO bulb was not fully in the socket...that fixed everything. The ICE Cap 660 is a “smart ballast” that will turn off if it is not making a full connection.

 

[Reef Bass]

Nice summary Craig, thanks. Good job with the pics.

Well done Shane. Your hood is coming along. I look forward to seeing it light up your tank.