SPS Addiction

Thats a sick blasto, seems $$$ lol


"Price is what you pay, value is what you get"

Love that blasto!

Here is a picture of a new frag of a colony I managed to kill a while back. This frag came from a fellow reefer (Cy) and it is just starting to color up nicely

i posted this on rc but i thought i would appreciate input from all the local reefers

I have been trying something new with my tank. Unfortunately it has not been going smoothly but I think it is interesting and want to try it out further:

I have used gfo in a reactor and carbon in a media bag for years. The carbon to help keep the water "clear" and remove some organics. The gfo to control phosphates. My parameters have always been reasonable.

I got intrigued by a thread where a fellow reefer started doing daily water changes. So after finally setting up a water station, I thought I could change out 5 gallons a day in my 180 gallon display. So if diligent, I would change out about 100% of water a month (3% daily). Sounded clever. But my water got too "clear" perhaps. Not positive, but I believe with the gfo and carbon, as well as my skimmer, the daily water changes over a couple of months just got it super clean. My sps, got some burnt tips and some frags showed thinning of the skin and just not as happy as they should be and some frags not surviving. Oh, forgot to add my alk runs around 8.5 via a calcium reactor.

So I just took the gfo and carbon out the other day. Been increasing feedings a lot to my fish. Stopped water changes for this week. And I will restart water changes next week again at about 5 gallons a day. The only reason I say about 5 gallons a day, is that sometimes I miss a day or two in the course of the month but otherwise pretty darn consistent.

What I am hoping to do is get all elements at an ideal range even trace elements through the constant water changes. Part of the allure of reef keeping is dialing everything in to maximize color and growth. I have never enjoyed changing out gfo, it is really messy and time consuming. Carbon is some like mystery thing to me, I never really understood what polishing water truly means. I like checking the tank out daily and with my nifty water station it only takes a few minutes to change out 5 gallons so it seems like win/win. Time will tell how it all plays out

Small daily water change seems like a good idea. Technically you can't never change out 100% of your tank water...because you will be changing 3% of the 3% new water you put in yesterday LOL
I have my water station set up in the garage and it's plumbed thru the wall directly into the tank so my weekly 10% water change takes like 5 minutes with just a few turns of the valves.

Darth maul porites

looking good.. sick blasto..

Interesting....

Still no love

Reef raft orange passion, not a great shot-- took it with the canopy on and I really couldn't see much in the display, my arms were stretched out thru the canopy to get it. I will keep trying on this little frag, the polyps are orange but don't seem to realize it in the photo

Got a photo lesson from a reefing friend. New picture from this evening, lousy focus but I used manual settings and finally was able to tweak some color. My friend suggested ISO at 100, manual settings with Fstop around 10-12 and shutter at 1/60th.

This is closer to what I actually see in my tank. This has been an ongoing effort of mine and it seems I have tried forever to capture the orange polyps in a photo. I kept the canopy on (mistake), t5's and mh on with no LEDS. Next time I will take the canopy off which should actually allow me to see what I am photographing and improve on focus. I had the ISO set at 100 which meant the LED viewing screen was all black, I could not see anything through it. This was pretty much just shoot and hope the autofocus found the right spot and then crop the picture way down. Camera takes 24 megapixels pics so that allows for lots of cropping.

Tadah....

Added brightness, exposure and fill light plus cranked temp up to 20k. Increased contrast slightly (or maybe decreased slightly--I forgot). This part was done in photoshop elements. Compare photo taken a couple of days ago to todays photo, yeah baby.

Super nice collection. Really like the Sps growth pics!

Nice shots! Not sure if you have both, but what is the difference between the reef raft and sexy corals orange passion?

I don't know any details of the sexy corals orange passion versus the reef raft usa orange passion. Pictures I have seen look good though of both. I am a fan of reef raft, Tony has amazing corals There are a number of vendors with either similarly named corals and/or similarly looking corals. The world of lineage leads to some outrageous claims.

This piece came from a very good reefer friend that got it from Tony at reef raft, hence reef raft orange passion. I am excited to finally take a photograph that really looks as cool as the coral does

Alright. I was going to purchase the sc one but after seeing yours I'm not sure. So I was just curious on the difference. The color on yours looks great though!

Good to live in southern california, we most definitely have the best LFS in the country here.

one of our local stores:

And of course, one other store

Frags were bigger when purchased, but I clip "all" frags off of original plugs, dip and reglue onto new plugs

Among the group is the diablo, d-day, avatar and triton. Fun stuff, now I just need to get the tank a little happier and grow some pretty colonies.

If you don't mind saying, where did you get the diablo at? I just lost mine and want to replace it

from reef raft

These are T5 only, no metal halides. they look like I adjusted the saturation but I didn't, just the exposure and brightness. I guess the t5s give the added boost in color

Got my blue spotted jawfish a while ago. Then he disappeared, only to reappear once again.

Here he is in his home:

Here is the guy, completing a remodel of his new home:

Orange crush are nice. Best slow grower in the world