Funny you should ask. A few days after adding the black dye back March 19 I took a series of photos specifically for the benefit of PBF members to see the effects. As happens all too often, I got lazy and never did anything with the photos on my phone.
Thanks to you, I now have the needed "push" to do something with them so they are now downloaded and are posted below. The first picture listed is of the main pond with the dye and the second picture is taken at the same time of day and angle of my adjacent sediment pond to get a comparison of dye vs. no dye. At times the water in my sediment pond looks drastically different than the main pond but at this particular time we had not had much rain so the waters were similar when the dye was added. The rest of the pictures are taken at different angles to show how "different" the pond can look depending on the angle of the shot and time of day taken.
All pictures were taken March 19 except for the last two. It was kind of overcast on the 19th and sunny the next day. Pictures labeled Black dye 3 and 4 were taken the next day one right after the other. One is of the right side of the dock and the other is of the left side both at 12:45 pm. I took these two just to show how the same water at the same time can look different simply because of the angle looking at the water. Pictures were pointing NW and SW. Notice the other picture taken off the dock the day before the water looks very much different because of sun/time of day.
In my opinion, for the most part, the black dye doesn't really make the pond look "black". Too little dye in too much water to do that. What it does is give it a slightly darker color but much more of a reflective "mirror" type surface rather than actually changing the overall color that much.
Hope this helps. My wife and I love the turquoise blue water of the Caribbean when we go scuba diving there. But somehow we neither one liked the similar color the blue dyes sometimes gives ponds. For our local setting and surrounding landscape it did not seem the right contrast for our taste. Thus the reason we decided to try the black dye which is much less popular than the blue.
