Where ever possible, I personally stay away from backgrounds. To me they make a tank look very flat and two dimentional. Right now I have my twenty gallon and six gallon next to a plainly painted wall, and have decorated them profusely with rock and plastic plants. The wall you can see through the decor actually seems to give the viewing a sense of space and depth, as if you're looking through thin air rather than into a fish tank. My room is painted a bright teal blue (kinda like the lightest color blue on the paper backgrounds) though, so I don't know if it would have the same effect with other colors. It also helps that I keep the glass really clean.
The 29g tank I do have a graduated blue background on, and I don't like it. When I view this tank, my vison and range of focus is stopped by the background, and it makes the tank look very flat and uninteresting because my eyes don't search though the hidy holes in the decor. I'm thinking of reversing the graduation of the blue, instead of having it go from light on top to dark, to dark on top to light, to see if that would help with the depth perception but I don't know.
The only time I've seen a background look half decent is on the 2 gallon hex I have at work. I covered the back three panels with a rock/plant picture background, and because of the shape of the tank, the back panel gives the tank some depth perception, and the side two panels draw your eyes into the tank and onto the picture of the background. It kinda gives the front of the tank a shadowboxed effect.
To me, a tank that draws my eye is a tank that begs me to look past the glass to search for what I can't see in the tank.
Hidy holes, unexpected little openings, a fish suddenly appearing where once before there wasn't. I'm not too concerned with hiding equipment unless it is really obtrusive. But the tank decor should draw the eye away from equipment into the depth of the tank. Sometimes people go to too much length to hide equipment, which only draws the eye to that spot, and those tanks make me loose interest really fast because who wants to look in a tank where the eye is constantly drawn to the filter intake or heater hiden behind a plant instead of a fish?
From what I can tell, I don't think the fish give two hoots about a background on their tank or not.
~~Colesea
