Monthly Archives: September 2010

The products for Modern Pet (a business I’m running with my sister and our other halves) are slowly coming in and we’ve just bought a cheap eBay light tent set-up to help with the product shots.

80cm light tent and lights all delivered for $130. The lights are awesome but the tent itself isn’t as white as I thought it would be, a little too thin, so thin that you can actually see the wooden floor through the tent.

My little assistant Mia couldn’t help but jump straight into the tent!

So here’s a shot un-edited. It’s not bad actually. With a more solid white floor under the products it should be a lot better (I’m thinking just white carboard will do).

And here’s a shot very roughly edited in Photoshop. No amount of levels/curves was going to work completely. I had to literally erase a lot of the shadow work by hand. I timed myself on this and it took me 10 minutes.

Nitrates are finally at 0! I don’t think they’ve ever been this low. Water is very very cloudy and smelly too. Yesterday I added a bag of carbon and the smell has gone away but the water is still cloudy. I’m hoping it’ll clear up by itself over the next few days.

My Uncle Tekky came around to test fit the hood he made.

The whole front panel opens up.

A sturdy and concealed shelf for the LED’s with bevelled edges for maximum light.

I then got busy with a screwdriver, hammer and crowbar and managed to get all the decorative trimming off.

I also ripped off that ugly black plastic corner trim for the cleaner ADA look.

Problems: The lights are sitting too far back of the tank and need to come forward about 9cm. That means he’s got to take it all apart, rip off the sides and pretty much put it all back together again. Lucky we did the test fit before painting though.

Feeling seedy and hung over Christina and I thought we’d better get some sun and yesterday we went to Botany Bay to collect some sea snails for Mr Mantis to eat.

Ouchies! Christina had a fall on the rocks.

I love rock pooling. Something Dad used to take me to do every week when I was a little kid (he’d go fishing and I’d play in the rock pools). There wasn’t much life in the rock pools though, water is still too cold.

This morning I broke out the test kits and tested my water parameters (I very rarely test it). My parameters are as follows:

Salinity: 1.027
KH: 13
pH: 8.4
Phosphate: 0.1ppm
Nitrate: 10ppm
Calcium 350ppm

They’re really quite good parameters so I’m super happy.

Also, my skimmer went nuts last night and it’s pulling out a lot of crap lately. All good signs!

In situ.

Still a mess (for now).

Live rock.

In other good news my nitrates have come down!

I’ve placed an order with Age of Aquariums for the ADA tank (a hang on back filter, led clip on lamp and a nano heater too). I’ve also added some live rock from the main display tank.