The Planted Tank Forum banner

Crazydaz's Square 200G RIPARIUM Stikes back-The End Teaser shots of new set up 7-24

253K views 848 replies 191 participants last post by  leequan 
#1 · (Edited)
Just finished up with the move from old rental property to new home. Life sure has been hectic lately!

So, the Journal starts over, and as much as I hated to tear down the tank from this:


and this:


To THIS:


and this:


.....but it had to be done. To re-set and try to go with the same aesthetic would have been uncreative and boorish. Everything was sold or given away. Many thanks to Tlyons01 who spent a "fun" afternoon tearing the tank down with me. It only took about 7 hours. :D

Prior to that, the outside of the stand/pedestal was removed. It was made of 2x4's: very solid construction, but the outside was made of pressboard. A terrible choice, in retrospect, for obvious reasons. It had been warped and bubbled, and was a total eyesore. So, I stripped it down and threw it out.

Here are a few pics of the new pedestal:




That is red oak stained with walnut with iron hinges and knobs. We're going for more of a "rustic" old-fashioned look for the sitting room, and I thought that this would look nice. Eventually, the pendant above the tank will be redone either in black, or it will be done to match the pedestal. Probably happen in January. In the new design, I added side doors in order to make accessing the equipment in the back easier to do. It has been triple coated in poly on all sides to ensure water resistance, and almost "water proofing."

The day following the drain and dis-assembly, we moved the tank, lighting, and new pedestal to the new house. This was all done within two hours, which was faster than I had anticipated. The move went flawlessly, and I was ready to re-start the scape. So....

IN went custom made Manzanita branches that came from hydrophyte, plain kitty litter (about 30lbs), and that was topped by MTS made by DogFish. The Manzy branches are semi-poseable that will allow me to move the "joints" as needed in order to access equipment with relative ease, or to alter the hardscape as desired. You will notice screws in some of the future pictures; these are the "joints" I refer to....just a simple screw and nut assembly. Hydrophyte did do a marvelous job cutting the ends of the branches into simple fittings through which the screw passes through and is held on the other side by the nut.

DogFish sent six large Flat Rate boxes of MTS to me months ago, and makes about a two inch layer in my tank. Wonderful stuff!:





Sprinkled on the potash, pressed it into the MTS, and then topped that with some of my old tank's substrate. Added the Seriyu stone and the old stone from CraigThor's tank, and now this is how it looked:





Three rock "peninsulas" are featured in this set up for bucephelandra, anubia, and java fern species; the substrate will feature mostly crypts.

More pictures tomorrow!!
 
See less See more
10
#755 ·
Thanks all for the compliments regarding Amazonas. It was a nice accomplishment, and it couldn't have been done without Devin's help.

Sorry that I have trailed off into the ether. I'm currently very busy with work and outside projects, and just haven't made much time to stay up to date on this thread. I'm trying to get it photo-ready for an opportunity this weekend, or at least a video of it. Have a nice foreground now, and though I'm waiting for some things to fill in from my last trim, I might as well grab a few pics soon.

Harsaphes, I think that I was simply alluding to the fact that the set up doesn't really "change" all that much from photo op to photo op. It is mostly a slow-growing system, and it really takes some time for anything "noticeable" to really happen. I am a little weary of posting consistent updates as many people may think "So.....what's different now from when you took the last set of photos? Why are you bugging us with miniscule updates?" Tank-fatigue is a real thing. :) People get tired of looking at the same system looking pretty much the same all of the time, and I can't blame them. I think that fellow hobbyists want or need changes to a system to stay engaged in the thread, and I'm just not one to do major re-scapes every so often for the heck of it. I didn't set up the system to be that way....it was originally designed to peak after a lot of time, and so, I'm just going to stick with that. lol!

Will try to get some eye candy up over the next several days! Thanks all!
 
#757 ·
Crazydaz's Square 200G RIPARIUM Strikes Back! Updated w/NEW PICS 2/15/14

Here are some pictures that I was able to take yesterday, mainly of the top portion. I am waiting until this evening to take aquatic photos when there is less glare. Also working on a video, too! Bought myself a new camcorder, so I'll be messing around with that, too!











































 
#842 ·
Here are some pictures that I was able to take yesterday, mainly of the top portion. I am waiting until this evening to take aquatic photos when there is less glare. Also working on a video, too! Bought myself a new camcorder, so I'll be messing around with that, too!











































Im not trying to be nosy or, to polite. But this tank Looks as if it would cost as much as my house!
These photos are even more detailed than my own eyes can see lol! Beautiful tank
 
#763 ·
Thank you Wei. I had forgotten that I hadn't had a carpet in the last set of pics. Whoops! I guess that is a change! LOL :D

Hi Philip! Thank you, and yes I still do have a few stems of the Ammannia that I am currently re-growing from a trim. Not a very fast grower.

Downshift.....thanks! :)

Bob, it is! I can spend an hour pruning, have a mountain of scraps, and you probably wouldn't be able to tell much of a difference. Yet, it's not over-bearing....most everything in there is pretty slow-growing.

Tyrone.....pretty neat image! hahaha!!
 
#768 ·
This tank is just unreal. I love every update!

Just one slight but. The colors look to unnatural to my eyes. Any chance to take a picture with daylight lamps only?
I get where you are coming from, and I kind of thought the same thing the very first time I saw this riparium, but I think a big part of the artistry of this tank is the lights, the steam, and the misting so the plants are wet. It makes it feel surreal and very jungle like. It feels like another world.

If he was photoshopping the pictures to make wacky fake colors, that'd be one thing, but this is how it looks in real life when he looks at it every day, so that's how it should look when he posts pictures. It's stunning.
 
#770 ·
Gary and SaltyDog- Thank you both very much for the compliments! I am happy that you guys appreciate the set up and the pictures! It helps keep me going! :D

Teddo- Of course I have to tweak the photos! If I didn't, it would be washed out by the blinding white of the Spanish Moss. Therefore, the photo is taken, and adjusted in my Canon software. I have to decrease the brightness, increase the contrast a bit, increase the saturation to get the warmth back, and I usually increase the sharpness. But all I am doing is getting it back to a true visual. There is so much light from 16 HO T5 54 watt bulbs that it becomes necessary to this. I don't consider it cheating as much as I consider it a true version of what my eyes see versus what comes out on film, which is blinding and would look "Eww." The only really big comp that I do is on the brightness level; everything else is somewhat minor adjustments to less the "Eww" factor.

Thank you Bushkill! The Gloxinella is a very pretty plant, and I lucked out that it would do well. From what I could tell, it should have, but you never know with these things sometimes until you get them, set them, and see how it responds. Other plants that I have gotten require hardening, and it's common for these species (like Marcgravia for instance) to disappear completely, only to re-emerge a few months later doing well. It always ends up surprising me what pops up.

Thank you AnotherHobby! In reality, that's all I'm trying to do is to compensate for the over-brightness from the lighting. You can see in the video below what the tank looks like from a video perspective, and I feel that it is comparable.

Johnson, thank you very much! The fern is called "Fluffy Ruffles" and was de-potted when I added it to the tank on top. It is sitting on top of a bed of leaf litter and trimmings from the tank, and covered at the base with the same. This was simply to keep it from drying out is all. It has since been able to grow it's root structure to the extent where they are touching the water, which is about 18" below where the main fern sits. It did that after about a month of being placed in it's location, and sends out runners like crazy, which I have taken and replanted elsewhere on the top.

I took this video using my new camcorder on Saturday and Sunday this past weekend. It's my first non-crappy, non-iPhone video.
: http://youtu.be/XbLc2540KM8
 
#774 ·
Thanks Lub! :D

AnotherHobby! Thank you! I wanted to show what it looked like in reality, without camera tweaks! heh heh. Even still, it isn't quite there, but it's pretty close.

Teddo, I didn't want you to think that I was mad or anything! :) I didn't mean to imply that you were implying anything! lol! Yes, I see what you mean, and the bulb choices do likely add to that effect of an "unnatural" aesthetic. I feel that it is probably a bit more exaggerated in the pictures than what it looks like in real life, which is one of the reasons I took the video.....to kind of show the tank without any sort of tweaks in the pictures, and maybe give people a better understanding of the truer look of the tank. You are right....the spectrum is a bit off, but it does bring out the colors to a greater degree by using some of those quirky bulbs. I can't complain with the results though! :D And Teddo, if for some reason you were to be critical of the tank, that's ok, too, my friend! You have no reason to apologize to me at all, sir! :) Thank you for mentioning that, and clarifying what you meant. You are correct!
 
#775 ·
Every time I see new pictures of your tank Don I'm amazed. One thing you can't edit in photos is the ability to grow healthy happy plants. I don't mind the tweaks in your photos because i understand how hard it is to get a photo to look like it does in person especially with the blinding lights like you have. And now I have a video to drool over.

Is your little Buce that you were using for a carpet plant still in there? Better yet just take some more pictures of the submerged portion so I can see for myself. :red_mouth
 
#778 ·
Ua hua and Saltydog-- It's still there....it's just growing under a bunch of lileopsis right now, I think. It wasn't growing fast enough, and it was really difficult to keep runners from both the crypts and lileopsis from growing under the runners of the buces. I would have to uproot them constantly, and they just weren't handling it to well. So, when I remove the lileopsis foreground, if they are still there, cool, if not, oh well. Not much I can do about it.

Forgot to post these submersed shots:

























 
#779 ·
What always gets me is how clean the plants look / are. No matter how hard I try I always seem to get some kind of detritus or caked on algae on plants here and there. I have good circulation ( least I think so) and good filtration... I just dun understands lol

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk
 
#781 ·
Gary, all of that is there. You can't really avoid it all. I suck up visible mulm, and do top offs directly over the plants to shake any detritus off that may have settled onto the leaves. There are spots of BBA....I just trim off old leaves on occasion to keep them looking nice is all.

Thanks Kwheeler! At the moment, a lot of bronze corys are in there. You just don't see many of them. I had a CO2 dump a while back that killed most of my fish, and I just haven't replaced them yet. I'll need to soon.
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top