Livestock Photographs
All Reef Chasers Photos are taken under 20K ACTINIC (blue) Reef Lighting using a Nikon Z7II Mirrorless Camera. Various Yellow Filters are then employed to strip the blue lighting away and give the most accurate, true-to-life color representation of what that coral looks like under actinic viewing. Everyone's reef tank is different, and your lighting may vary. Complaints about nuanced variation in coloration or natural light vs actinic are not valid reasons to demand a Refund or Store Credit. These are live animals, and we encourage all of our customer's to do their research before completing a purchase.
REEF CHASERS PHOTOGRAPHY
Photographing Livestock is a challenging task, especially since often our light spectrums are bathed in blue! Typically, we try to keep the 'post processing' of imagery to a minimum, or at least if having to do so heavily, it's in a way that brings a true representation of the corals colors into a digital format. A camera can always get more "up close and personal" to a subject in our reefs than our own eyes can, and often times macro photography reveals an entirely new world by bringing to the forefront those hard-to-see, minute details. It is important to a remember that macro photography of Livestock is exciting, challenging, and illuminating!
Most coral photographs at Reef Chasers are taken under actinic lighting using a mechanical lens filter that removes the blue light. This is known as a "Yellow Filter" and any professional reef photographer has one in his tool kit. Yellow Filters range in effect, but here at Reef Chasers we use the softest possible lens filter (Yellow #8) to do the bare minimum in removing the blue light without adding any crazy "glows". It also leads to the best, most accurate representation of a corals true color and in 90% of the cases not much else needs to be done.
While this technique works to great effect, it also makes accurately representing blues (pinks/purples) a bit of a challenge. It tends to enhance oranges and reds, and it's one of the reasons why we prefer to use the minimum filter Yellow #8 so this effect is minimized. For example, a 24k Gold Torch with yellow polyps and blue tips is a pretty challenging photograph under blue lights. In those cases, extra post-processing efforts must be made in order to restore the 'true colors' of the specimen and to get the most accurate digital representation possible.
At the end of the day, we want our customers to be happy with their purchases, so keeping our photographs as accurate and true-to-life as possible is in everyone's best interest and our photography is something we take a lot of pride in at Reef Chasers!