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I keep marine aquaria which include live corals. To many people's surprise (including other aquarists), corals are predators, feeding on zooplankton at night. To demonstrate this to my fellow aquarists, I shot some time lapse photographs of some of my corals feeding and I thought the folks here might be interested (from a photographic perspective). Note that these were sort of rushed, and I believe I could get better exposure.

Faviid
Trachyphyllia
Fungia

and the outtake:
Outtake

There are a lot of images in these at around 50K per image so best not to try on dialup and allow plenty of time for the images to be preloaded before playing.

Absolutely fascinating

Fantastic work and very very interesting ......... keep posting

cheers
bp

Wow, that's awesome, nice work! Great use of time-lapse!

P.S. Your avatar freaks me out with the blinking!

I second the creepy factor with the avatar...

That's some funky time lapse...after watching the coral feeding I became queasy tho.

Very cool ATJ...nice piece of software too that enables you to create this loop of time-lapse photography! Keep up the great work and post more!

The coral feed ing is very interesting.

Good capture and well presented.


MATT

Interesting and well done, ATJ that was all worthwhile i would say you have captured the moments and is all about experimenting.
Great work.

Thanks for the responses.

It's actually very easy to do using Nikon Capture. I batch processed all the images (mainly resize, a little bit of contrast tweaking and the addition of the copyright text) with PaintShopPro. Now that I have the JavaScript code to control the display of the images, the longest part of making a series available for display is the uploading.

Here are a couple of other photographs of corals that you might find interesting. The show fluorescent pigments that the corals have.

Fluorescence

Each pair is two photographs of the same coral; one taken under normal lighting and the other using filters on the flash and camera lens. The filter on the flash only lets short wavelength light through and the one on the lens lets longer wavelength light through. None (well, very little because it isn't perfect) of the light from the flash can make it to the lens through normal reflection so you only pick up fluorescence.

Fantastic site ATJ

I hate to see your electricity bill

Very interesting work.

That's all well and good ATJ, u know I love the time lapse stuff, but your blinking is freaking me out

Very impressive, great use of time lapse photography

Thought I just had about the blinking...it'd be funky if you had one eye blink then the another....

ATJ wrote:Each pair is two photographs of the same coral; one taken under normal lighting and the other using filters on the flash and camera lens. The filter on the flash only lets short wavelength light through and the one on the lens lets longer wavelength light through. None (well, very little because it isn't perfect) of the light from the flash can make it to the lens through normal reflection so you only pick up fluorescence.

Now that is a clever technique, and the results are spectacular! Awesome work!

Great stuff !

Amazing.

Mic.

Clever work great images.
marco

Excellent results, great to see the pocillporin and other pigments in these corals.

Nice work... Love the outtake. Maybe I could set up something like this to see what is happening to beer in the fridge

I can't get these images to display, have they gone already?

Deb

very cool. outtake is fun - so the fish stole it... only problem is i couldn't sport where the food was...