210G Aquascape – More Photos!

Back in September, a fellow GWAPA member, Michael, asked me to come and take pictures of his beautiful 210G aquarium so that he would have something to submit to the AGA competition. I previously blogged about this experience, but at the time, didn’t want to post the pictures until after the AGA competition had been decided. Below are a few more pictures from the shoot:

The 210G gallon aquarium acts as a room divider between Michael’s living room and dining room so that it is visible from three sides. This provides the unique challenge of making all three sides equally pleasing to look at. The picture above is what Michael considered the “front.” This shot was a lot of fun to take because I was behind the camera holding a flash up in the air toward the ceiling to bounce light from the ceiling into the tank. His wife was holding a hair dryer over-top of the water, creating the ripple effect, and Michael was to the right of tank trying to coax his pet discus to line up in a nice row like you see.

The “front” side of the aquarium is dominated by a beautiful stand of Nymphea lotus, with a really nice portion of Lagenandra meeboldii ‘pink’ to the left of it. The “back” of the aquarium(above) was much less vibrant in coloration, but still showed tremendous growth in the Cryptocoryne lutea and Blyxa aubertii. I’ve since heard that he has drastically thinned out these plants to provide more space for the discus.

The full cabinet that the aquarium sits on was custom made, and is very well done. I don’t know how he keeps the white stand looking so nice, but he does. I also really like how he used emersed growing Anubias to obscure drip-tube that provide new water to the tank daily.

Finally, with quite a few nice discus shots, I couldn’t help myself from trying to get a little bit artsy with one of them. I especially liked the shot above because it reminded me of the pictures I looked at as a child in old black-and-white aquarium books from the library. In any case, I promised that I would share more photos was the AGA released their results, so I wanted to keep good on that word. You can find more technical information about Michael’s aquarium, as well as, the AGA judges’ comments on the Aquatic Gardener’s website.