Gunther's daughter Caprice described her father, at his funeral, as a "naturalist, boilermaker, off-shore oil rig underwater welder, engineer, construction manager, fake-rock sculptor, reptile exhibit designer-builder, photographer, award winning author, lungfish breeder, reptile wrangler, frog-call decipherer and lion & tiger keeper in his youth at Braunschweig Zoo." His interest in photographing fish began at home in Germany — his images were first published in a German hobbyist magazine when he was just 15 — and after emigrating alone to Australia in 1965 with a German-to-English dictionary in hand, he spent the summer of 1966–67 on a solo expedition through western Queensland, the Northern Territory and South Australia in a French-built Simca Aronde, on largely unsealed roads, all recorded on film that has since mostly decayed.

He settled first in Sydney, where a mid-1970s meeting at the Australian Herpetological Society began a decades-long friendship with fellow photographer Gary Stephenson, and where he met Dr John Merrick, with whom he later co-authored the Whitley Award-winning Australian Freshwater Fishes – Biology and Management (1984). In 1986 he and his wife Angie moved to Mudgeeraba on the Gold Coast, joining ANGFA Queensland; ANGFA member Robert Pulvirenti, a close friend for almost 45 years, later recalled that their own friendship began after Gunther gave a talk at the Sydney Aquarium Society in the late 1970s and, "in typical Gunther fashion", invited a stranger home to see his fish.

Friends who travelled with him told the same kind of stories: a photographer so committed to "the shot" that he once talked a policeman through his own field guides while illegally-collected protected fish sat in a bucket at his feet, and let a Lamington Spiny Crayfish keep hold of his thumb rather than lose the pose he was after. Stephenson recalled Gunther's declining hearing turning long drives into a running joke — any mention of a snake by the roadside would be met with "vhere?" — and his general contempt for return trips to "cold and vet Germany", a country he never had any wish to see again. He was, by his own account on Facebook, unsentimental about the craft itself: "taking the shot is easy, it comes down to those that are skilful enough to handle an animal that results in a natural, sometimes defensive or even aggressive pose being achieved."

His last great field trip, at age 71 in 2013, was an eleven-week, 21,500 km circuit of the country chasing a decades-old ambition: to see the Goyder River in Arnhem Land, home of the Regal Rainbowfish form that had been "a bit like the holy grail" to him since he first kept one in Melbourne in 1978. Arriving at last after a mechanical breakdown and a week's wait for parts in Nhulunbuy, he found the crossing littered with rubbish left by other travellers — "I had not been that disappointed in a long time" — but that evening, alone with a dip net, he "had done what I had come for, catching my first Goyder rainbows myself."

Personal background drawn from Gary Stephenson's "A tribute to Gunther Eugen Schmida" and Robert Pulvirenti's "Trips away with Gunther Schmida", both in Fishes of Sahul Vol. 36(2)–(3), 2022, and from Gunther's own two-part account "The curse of the Goyder", in the same issues.

The Curse of the Goyder – Parts 1 & 2

Fishes of Sahul, Vol. 36(2)–(3), 2022

Gunther's own account of the 2013 road trip, decades in the planning, to the Goyder River rainbowfish's home water — a mechanical breakdown, a week stranded in Nhulunbuy, and a disappointing, rubbish-strewn crossing redeemed by one evening alone with a dip net.

What's in a Name Anyway? My Thoughts on the Genus Melanotaenia

Fishes of Sahul, Vol. 11(1), March 1997

Gunther's earliest Fishes of Sahul byline, an opinionated essay on rainbowfish taxonomy and nomenclature from a photographer who had spent decades trying to record every form in the genus.

Blowing My Own Trumpet

Fishes of Sahul, Vol. 26(3), 2012

"This year marks the 52nd since I first picked up a camera to… photograph aquarium fishes." A rare piece of first-person reflection on his own photographic career, from a first failed roll of film to five decades behind the lens.