MrV's acropora collection
I think your corals are spectacularly healthy and a lot of those frags look like they will be amazing.
Your photography skills equal the beauty of your frags and the super high resolution makes my eyes pop.
You are clearly using a very good photo editing application as well. You clearly know your way around both a camera and a computer AND you have great reefing skills to along with that..
Really really nice!
but I I do have to say that your corals are lacking a certain old fashioned connection to reality..
What I mean by that is, being a person who still uses my and t5 primarily for my lighting, when I look at these led driven pic, I don't really see them as real..
I know led lighting is the future and I know it is a perfectly good (maybe better) light source for corals, I am just not there yet..
I see corals that look like this under vendor lighting- usually using radion g4 pros. But I often don't buy from those tanks anymore because I know that when I bring corals home from those tanks I will be disappointed with them..
One day I will go to leds and revel in the colors I'm seeing in your corals but since I still use old fashioned lighting, I can't get my head around your shots...
I really don't mean this to be a put down or an insult.. you clearly know what you are doing.. I guess I am getting philosophical about lighting here..
So, in a way your shots have gotten me all existential... and that's a god thing!!
Thank you. And you are correct about the lighting and "œold fashion corals".
I actually have a tank build on r2r for a couple years. My first sps tank, I mostly keep old school corals. And they look better under 20k lighting. Most of them will not pop under blue/actinic lighting (so if you try to shoot them under blue light, they will actually look uglier). However the new trend of corals right now is "œcorals that pop under blue".
I think it's because the way collectors (diver?) collect them in the wild. Before they just dive at day time, using daylight to pick the corals. So any coral that are blue/red/yellow/purple under daylight considered good corals and collected. Now, divers equipped themselves with blue flash light when they collect coral, and under blue light, there is a whole new world opening. You ever think that those rainbow tenuis that people selling for crazy money right now, why they don't collect them 10 years ago?
About what is realistic, what is not. I have to disagree with the argument that blue light is not realistic. I have 7 hours of blue light on all of my systems, whenever I have only 6 hours of normal light (20k) and most of that time I am not home. So it's realistic to me, I always see my tank under blue, I always enjoy my corals pop like that. One day I visited a reefer that have 14k metal halide in his tank and I had to say: "œman, your tank look unrealistic. I rarely see a reef tank look like that"
End of the day, if the corals look good under blue/acrinic light, then why don't why just simply enjoy them under blue light? If a girl look beautiful under markups, I never bother to see how she look without markups.[emoji4]
Those pictures you see above are what I see in my tank, every day.
Proving that I do have old school corals, [emoji4]
