20 Gallon Planted Journal (! 56k)

Karackle

Close up of the driftwood with moss:



Close up of the small red crypt wendtii / center of the tank:


And some decent shots of my neons / right side of the tank:




After taking these pics I decided everything was too.....green...in part due to the new bulb which us accidentally 5000 in color....partly due to my very similarly colored green plants....other than the red crypt in the front...

Karackle

so I got a REALLY nice, large, red crypt Wendtii from my LFS today! The ones they had in the "for sale" plant display tanks were kind eh, short, rather green, but they had some in the fish display tanks that were MUCH nicer, and the guy was really nice and gave me one of those instead : ) He looked at the display ones and said "yeah, i can see why you'd rather have one of the other ones, let's do that" They had Crypt retrospiralis which was also cool, and reddish, but i decided i had enough tall grass-like plants. Now i'm thinking it might look cool mixed in with the Crypt spiralis...anyway...

pictures of the re-rescape with the new red crypt. Looked amazing in store, put it in my tank, took some pics....everything still looked pretty green:


Different camera setting:


Close up:


another setting/close up:

Better....not great..

Karackle

And then I decided to swap the new light with the 5000 rating out for the old one that came with the tank

And Voila:


You can see the red in the red crypts :


I think it's very pretty:


I think it definitely needed the extra color provided by the plant itself, but I think the bulb made a huge difference too.

Still not sure I love the scape...i think the Tennellus is getting lost in the Crypt spiralis grove. I might move it to my 5g. And I need to move the large crypt (the new one) slightly more to the right I think.

As always, i'd love feedback! Yes, i know the substrate is a bit unsightly, but any and all feedback is welcome. Things to change? keep? remove?

I'm thinking it needs some more hardscape on the right side...thoughts?

Karackle

Also, I Got a few good shots of the cories (still in their QT tank, but they'll be going in the 20g so I thought i'd switch to talking about them over here....for a little background and more pics see this thread (Cories for my 20g?) )

Couple good close-ups of one little guy who was posing :-P
First one with the wrong light-correction setting:


And with the proper light correction setting:


And a pile' o ' cories :


Every time i look at these little guys i can't get over how tiny they are, i just love them!!! So far all 10 are doing well! I hope it's not too much for my bio-load to add all 10, they're SO TINY right now that I think it should be ok for the moment, and by the time they get bigger (if that ever happens ;-)) i should have another tank up and running so i can move half of them over to that one :-D

Sorry for the monster post....had a lot of catching up to do in this journal!