If you spend anytime on reef aquarium social media these days, especially facebook and instagram you might be shocked by how colorful some people’s corals tanks and corals are. Hopefully by now most of you are aware that these photos are not a faithful representation of what these corals ‘really’ look like in person.
Just like swimsuit and fashion models, there’s colorific lighting for ‘makeup’, flattering settings in camera, yellow or orange filters to block the flood of sapphire spectrum, then a varying degree of photo editing done either manually, or automatically based on the camera or phone. When you see enough of these pictures and what amounts basically to aquarium glamor shots, you might be wondering why your tank doesn’t look like that?
The obvious answer is that the VAST MAJORITY of what you’re seeing at doesn’t appear that way if you were observing it in real life either, but it is possible to get mega colorful corals without any substantial camera, lighting, or editing tricks. We’ve been tweaking our coral care recipe over the last year and think we might have finally ‘arrived’ at a formula that makes almost all of our corals shine and pop, and to be honest most of them look even better under white light than they do under blues.
We’ll revisit what it is that has lit up these corals like photoshop in real life in some future videos and articles but for now we just had to show you what’s poppin’ in coral flat #2 at the Reef Builders Studio. Between the psychedelic scolies, uber orange chalices, multicolor euphyllias, saturated cyphastreas and others, there’s a living rainbow of color in this bare bones coral aquarium.
Sure some of the more subtle colors of the SPS in particular are muted in some of the colonies, the polyp and corallite colors definitely show up more under bluer light. But by and large we’re just thrilled to see such a thriving community of corals that represents nearly all the major coral groups, which is one of the hardest goals to achieve within a single common aquarium.
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