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Viktor,
How did you clean the green algae over the dragon stones? I tried to brush them, but seem doesn't really work out.

Need to brush sometimes, but the Neritina snails also helpful and the PO4 what we do add sometimes on the top of the regular fertilizers.
 
Must get me 80 fishes!! Superbly well done once again. My only negative comment is that the first video's music is definitely not "minimal". :D

Thanks mate :) Yup on the music i usually pick something from Youtube to stay legal :)
Unfortunatelly they do not have an "aquascaping music genre" :) so depend on my mood i just pick a slow or a more dinamic one. ;)
 
Thanks mate :) Yup on the music i usually pick something from Youtube to stay legal :)
Unfortunatelly they do not have an "aquascaping music genre" :) so depend on my mood i just pick a slow or a more dinamic one. ;)

Music & Youtube - a nightmare :(
If you have time you can get Creative Commons Licenced music in freemusicarchive.org.
 
Wow the tank is almost 4 months old. We built it on a workshop and now we had another one today about aquarium photography.

This is what we did with the visitors today. The scape is done. Acicularis could have been better, but i trimmed this this week as this was not enough tall.

With original water level:

9529870299_4618790e70_b.jpg
Photo workshop - final selected images by viktorlantos, on Flickr

and low water level

9529956937_24500da74c_b.jpg
Aquarium photo workshop by viktorlantos, on Flickr

More photos on the workshop steps here: Workshop series - Aquarium Photography 20130817 - a set on Flickr

The photos are too fresh no really retouching yet. Just contrast and sharpening a little.

The final shots was done with:

ISO 100, 40mm, f11, 1/100
Canon 5D Mark III, Canon 17-40 F4, 2*Bowens 500R, 90*30 Softbox, plastic white background which we backlighted.
 
You can spot treat with H2O2, you can also do a larger water change, add Excel/Easy Carb, that will kill anything, or if not too much trouble, remove the stones one at a time and scrub, Excel etc them in a sink, then return.
Some report good results with zebra nerites.

A toothbrush and good scrubbing also works for a lot of algae.

The design reminds me of the Gloss Scape from ADA's book 1, nice looking.
UG is a lot of work, you thought the HC was a lot of work if you filled this tank?? The UG is worse.

Likely a wise decision.
 
You can spot treat with H2O2, you can also do a larger water change, add Excel/Easy Carb, that will kill anything, or if not too much trouble, remove the stones one at a time and scrub, Excel etc them in a sink, then return.
Some report good results with zebra nerites.

A toothbrush and good scrubbing also works for a lot of algae.

The design reminds me of the Gloss Scape from ADA's book 1, nice looking.
UG is a lot of work, you thought the HC was a lot of work if you filled this tank?? The UG is worse.

Likely a wise decision.

Cheers Tom,
I am not using H2O2 too much because i had bad experiences with shrimps. Maybe i used too much from the 3% solution, but i lost some Caridina Japonica at that time. Carbo does better for BBA than 3% H2O2 with spot dose.
However we use daily Carbo around 7ml for this tank along with other daily fertilizers.

We have 2 Neritina here which is a nice cleaner, but this week we had to toothbrush all the stones and do 200% water change after that.
This week we had 4 water changes before the photo shoot. Last was on thursday. Not worked with the tank on friday to keep it crystal clear.

It's not a world class one, but i am glad another minimal is done and after 4 months it looks like a rock star on photo :) We need to look after some challenges. Like the UG or something :)
 
Finnaly had time to select 2-3 images from the shooting we had yesterday.

As the camera settings were down i had to adjust a little the photos. Luckily with the RAW format most of the things solved quickly.

The following adistment happened with the images.

Lightroom:
  • Exposure -0.6
  • Sharpness 50
  • Crop
  • Since we held the backlight bowens in the air, the lamp angle made 2 points darker on the background. So we used Adjustment Brush and exposure correction +1-2 on these points
Photoshop:
  • The camera tripod head was tilted down a little, we had to correct the lower corners of the tank glass. Transform - Perspective
  • With RGB curve the contrast fixed
  • Image resized to 2500 pixel (original was shoot in 3800)
  • Unsharp Masking added
With these minor fixes the images looked great. Not needed any WB change etc.

picked 3 from the set where the water level was lower.

9539030534_184b2bed4d_b.jpg
Workshop photos - Final ones by viktorlantos, on Flickr

9539030040_7ae1737d5e_b.jpg
Workshop photos - Final ones by viktorlantos, on Flickr

9539031064_ca9c41705a_b.jpg
Workshop photos - Final ones by viktorlantos, on Flickr

Amanda fishes were too shy to swim in the upper part, but luckily we had enough of them (80-100 fishes) to shoal nicely with the photo session.
Of course a few minor adjustment would improove the image and i would love to have the same image with 100mm too (we shoot it with 40), but we did not had enough space and we shoot the tank in dark with the strobes :)

Hope you enjoyed the journal and the result. I think this is a nice minimal layout with just a minor maintenance. But still looks awesome. :) :snaphappy:
 
BTW the eleocharis on the front was so dense that i almost was unable to trim it with the ADA Wave scissor which is ridiculous. :) This tool is super strong and sharp, but the grass was like a wire.
I think i need a bonsai tool shortly :D
 
Lovely tank viktor. Would you say that soft water is better with regards to CO2? Not sure if youve tried hard water.
 
Wow absolutely stunning!!! Could you tell how long you will keep it in this condition before you're going to rescape it approximately?

When I look at you're flickr photo's (stunning again!!) I see a lot of tanks with two filters. From which size tank would you recommend that or does it depend on the kind of scape?
 
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Lovely tank viktor. Would you say that soft water is better with regards to CO2? Not sure if youve tried hard water.

Used / using both. But surely soft is the way to go in many ways. Not because you need less CO2, but because many plants looks much better and the overall impression will be nicer.
 
Wow absolutely stunning!!! Could you tell how long you will keep it in this condition before you're going to rescape it approximately?

We usually keep these tanks in the showroom for 8-12 months. Then a new installation needed to have something new to our visitors.
So it is not because we could not keep it up and going, it is because we want something else.

When I look at you're flickr photo's (stunning again!!) I see a lot of tanks with two filters. From which size tank would you recommend that or does it depend on the kind of scape?

Usually above 120cm width. 2 filters also gives you a backup way if one of your filter goes down (leak etc) which is frequent on many current brands nowadays.
But of course we do use also the larger filters like the 1200xl or the largest classic 2260 with the largest pump (3500lph)

So on a 120cm tank (240L) with high light we do use around 2000-2500lph and the large filter trays filled with bio media only and with purigen.
 
BTW this tank rescaped a few times since this journal.

The current look is this. So change is good and you can try different things :)

16579648947_9663bf6c07_b.jpgGreen Aqua Showroom by viktorlantos, on Flickr

16785831262_0d59b2c8bf_b.jpgGreen Aqua Showroom by viktorlantos, on Flickr

It's done by our friends on this event:



We let our board members to rescape most of our tanks once in the lifetime :) It was fun.
 
Hey Victor could I ask what T5 tubes you use? I am not happy with the colours from what I am currently using.

Thanks

And btw I love all your tanks, although I do find it frustrating how you have so much success with very high light, a glass co2 diffuser and not ideal flow... yet I struggle with med light, inline co2 and overkill flow.

What ever it is that makes you so successful, keep doing it and showing us the pics!
 
Hey Victor could I ask what T5 tubes you use? I am not happy with the colours from what I am currently using.

Thanks

And btw I love all your tanks, although I do find it frustrating how you have so much success with very high light, a glass co2 diffuser and not ideal flow... yet I struggle with med light, inline co2 and overkill flow.

What ever it is that makes you so successful, keep doing it and showing us the pics!

Cheers :)

We usually use Osram or Sylvania 865 THO tubes. Sometimes add a little reddish like Grolux or Giesemann proflora.
Lighting is on for 7hrs every day. Showroom has shaders on all windows. This is quite important. Many has light room at home which cause algae problems even if the tank is far from all windows.

The success with high light is to give the most to your plants. As you may know we're using soft water in our showroom on all the displays.
Only RO sometimes adding in GH boosters, but TDS is around 100-120ppm usually.
Daily fertilizers. This is important if you have so much light. Less room for errors.
Water temp is around 22-24 celsius. Never above that. We just started to use air conditioning again for this season as room temp is getting warmer now.
Good filtration fully loaded with bio media.
CO2. No matter if this is diffuser or reactor or in-line. You need to keep the diffuser clean (weekly max bi-weekly cleaning) to be efficient. Also less surface movement with Lily pipes.
Of course weekly maintenance. 30-40% water change with RO.

For us this works quite well. We have algae issues mainly at start (diatom), but we're not the slow starter guys. So we shoot the lights with full power from the beginning and do more maintenance in the first 2-3 weeks rather than start slow and risk that some of the plants may will not have enough light.

The reason why we goes on the high light way to eliminate all limitation on plant selection. Then we can focus only on the scape.
 
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