Fish Tank Glamour Shots

So while Sonny is in Taiwan, we communicate via iMessage most commonly, with the occasional Skype session thrown in whenever we have time and/or are missing each other especially. However, his most asked about aspect of my life here in New Zealand without my hubby is not me, or how I'm doing, or the dogs, or how clean I am keeping the house ;) - no its the FISH TANK! At least once a day he requests updates, and asks me how this coral is doing or whether that coral is growing. So I finally gave in and took a bunch of pictures so he could see how his beloved fish tank is doing, and also as a benchmark, because its fun to look at old pictures and see how the corals grow.

The whole shebang - its actually starting to look like a proper tank

Seriatopora guttatus (Birds nest coral) is growing quite quickly - 
that split on the left just happened last week

The "Blurple" Acropora is far more strongly blue coloured at the tips than
I can capture without blasting the lights and stressing the corals

Remember that tiny piece I pulled out of the sand? Yeah the Pavona venosa
has come a long long way. Its really hard to capture how twisted
and rolled on itself it is now. Its still my favourite

I call this the "ear" coral - Turbinaria peltata

Goniopora in the front there, too bad its retracted and mushrooms in the back

Stylophora pistillata

Sunset encrusting montipora

Purple branching Montipora (left)
Purple Acropora (right) 

The yellow polyp zoanthid is also doing really well

Finally, exciting news, it now truly is a fish tank as 3 blue streak cardinals have been added!

I would like to end on the note that these photos took me three days and several hours to capture. First the lighting is an issue because corals prefer much bluer light than cameras and second, focussing through glass into water is also difficult. I took the first round of photos, got them all loaded on my computer for some color correction and realised over half weren't in focus. So I did round two, re-taking several photos, trying different angles, holding as still as possible, etc. I fared better on the second round, but still ended up doing a third round to capture a few corals that just weren't in focus. I then spent an hour or so processing all the photos trying to fix the majorly blue cast, cropping, etc. I finish all this and then take a peek at Sonny's last round for correct names and realise none of his photos are in focus.

sigh.

 I need to be less of a perfectionist methinks.