Diving Inside the Aquadom Reef tank in Berlin, Germany (a boys dream)

As I walked home from University two years ago I passed by the huge construction site next door which eroded several of our offices and lecture rooms. Meanwhile they had put up a huge illustration on what the building should look like one day.

While my eyes wandered across the posters of the outside view of the new SAS Radisson Hotel I suddenly stopped. The picture I saw made my jaw drop. I never expected this to happen, especially not 200 metres away from the university building I had to visit every week.



Somebody was going to build the giant fish tank of which I dreamt as a boy. The illustration of the hotel's lobby showed a giant cylinder filled with water and corals and an elevator inside. The description next to it said. The DomAquarée is located in the heart of Berlin at the Spree River, featuring the giant and unique AquaDom.

If you are a diver the first thing in your mind is of course "Oh my good, I need to dive in that thing…". Once I returned home I launched my web browser to find out more about the project on the Internet. It revealed the following…

One single seamless column, 14 meters high, will contain nearly a million litres of water. Twenty-five meters in height and 11.5 meters in diameter are the vital statistics of the AquaDom built in the CityQuartier DomAquarée. Of its kind the AquaDom is the biggest aquarium in the world and is located in Berlin, Germany.

The AquaDom is operated by the ICM company and marketed by the Sealife Center Berlin. It is open to visitors since December 2003. Sealife also operates several other fish tanks inside the DomAquarée which are focused on edutainment. You can learn about the local environment of our lakes and coasts in Europe and also meet sharks and rays that live in the Northern Sea. They also feature the previously mentioned shark tunnel. At the end of your visit you can use your ticket to have one moderated elevator ride through the AquaDom. Unlike the Sealife Center, the dome features tropical fish, such as Napoleons, Yellow tangs, Masked Pufferfish and some morays. Most of the fishes are juveniles and are expected to grow during the next years - especially the Napoleons (the editors especially look forward to that). The entry fee is currently 13.50 EUR. There are also special rates for school classes and teachers enjoy free entry.


The daily feeding and tank cleaning is managed by PADI Instructor Peter Müller. Peter has a complete line-up of wetsuits, regulators and tanks in the cellar. The AquaDom can only be entered with these to have control over infections and bacteria getting in the fish tank. We were only allowed to bring masks and camera equipment into the dome. All other diving equipment is sponsored by Aqualung, Germany and very comfortable to wear. So we did not miss our own gear that much.

Peter's tanks are filled by Berlin's Tauchsportservice Klotz, which acts as the main supply facility for diving. There have been some unconfirmed rumors that someday limited dives will be available for the public. digideep.com will inform you about the price and availability as soon as we know more details.

The DomAquarée was financed by the DIFA Deutsche Immobilien Fonds AG. The CityQuartier DomAquarée is conveniently situated directly on Berlin's renowned Unter den Linden boulevard. In a real sense it is located right in the very heart of Berlin's historic centre - just a few meters away from the spot where Berlin was founded nearly 800 years ago. It features a shopping area, the SAS Radison Hotel, The Sealife Center, Business Offices and flats for rent and ownership. And most important it protects the AquaDom from the harsh weather during winter time.

For constructing the AquaDom the ICM company from Grand Junction/Colorado, USA was a major find. They have developed an adhesive technology for acrylic glass that can seal acrylic components of between 16 to 22cm thickness without leaving visible joining marks. Actually the editors were shown the joining marks by the chief engineer during the press conference. You might discover them on some of our photos, but they are really hard to find.

We were amazed by the fact that the whole AquaDom was held at a constant temperature above 50 degrees Celsius, for the joining process, while it was sometimes only around 12 degrees Celsius outside. Construction workers were not capable of fully closing the buildings rooftop at that time, as the giant acrylic plates had to be fitted in from above.

Thanks to the great support of Sealife's Marketing Manager Markus Koch and dive ward Peter Müller, the digideep.com staff was the first professional group of photographers allowed to take underwater pictures from inside the fish tank. Also we have to give big thanks to Uwe Kiehl from UK-GERMANY who was helping us out with an extremely small housing for our Canon EOS 10D camera with a Sigma 15mm fisheye lense. The camera and housing performed great and are going to receive detailed review credits in a separate article soon.

The AquaDom is a very challenging environment for an underwater photographer who is used to shooting out in the real world. We had some ideas of how to manage the reflection and glass distortion issues but had to drop them once we were down in the cylinder at 12 metres. We also wanted to have pictures from people standing inside the elevator and our diving model Aline touching the glass from the watery side. We had no real idea what this was going to look like, or if the convex acryl would allow us to use a strobe. Would we need to shoot with ambient light?


Eric Cheng, from wetpixel.com was suggesting some ideas a few hours before we left for the photo session. He brought up the idea of a tripod inside the water, to allow sharp images with long exposures. A good option, although we skipped it because we did not want to sacrifice our tripod to seawater and reserved it for other purposes. If everything would have failed we still had a second 10D mounted on the tripod inside the elevator, but these shots had been done by other photographers before.

What we had not thought of was the super-nova beam of the lights mounted on the top of the AquaDom. It almost cancelled the usual option of shooting upwards. So we started to take pictures with all lights switched of and just the elevator illuminated. There are a few images from the elevator view when the underwater photographer turned his modelling light on. But the camera inside the elevator became useless apart form that scene. So we decided to switch on the lights again. But this time only on one half of the AquaDom.

This way we finally managed to produce some stunning shots. Also we enjoyed the advantage of full coverage from inside and outside the elevator. Once you become familiar with the annoying reflexes after some trial and error shooting the inside view rewards you with some amazing optical effects of Aline mirrored in the giant outer walls.

If you know of other underwater photographers who also have shots from the inside view of fish tanks we would be glad to get in touch and compare the results. Overall we have to say that the AquaDom it is a really unique photo environment because the cylinder shape allows you to capture some of the strangest optical effects we have seen so far.

We have opened a thread concerning the AquaDom and fish tank shooting in our forum and would be happy to answer your questions and discuss fish tank shots in general.

Below you find some selected shots from our Sealife / AquaDom gallery click here to view them all. Also we have detailed picture stories of Sealife's opening and fish release press conferences available online.