Last week, I had the pleasure of working with Gloria Battista-Collins on a photoshoot of her amazing flower arrangements. Lighting floral arrangements is something I've become rather interested in lately. It seems to me there are two ways to approach lighting floral arrangments and it's in combining the two ways of thinking that you get a balance. Floral arrangments are works of art made of living things. At the same time we experience flowers primarily in nature, so to our eye lighting floral arrangements from relatively natural angles is usually the best bet. Here are some simple tips for good floral lighting...
For Special Events such as weddings..
- Set your flowers off with contrasting colors in the back light and clear warm key light.
- If possible don't light your floral arrangements at a ninety degree (straight down) angle.
- Don't be afraid of shadows...let the light fall through petals and stems to create texture
In Your Home...
- Floral arrangements are a great way to set off focal points in your home. When planning renovations concerning lighting, make sure your designer creates ways to light mantles, table tops, and focal areas with multiple adjustable sources.
- Sometimes, a single key light on a floral arrangment can change everything.
- Accenting your mantle or table top softly and then letting the arrangement "pop" with an added key light will make your floral arrangements look amazing.
Thoughts? Questions? Find me on Facebook or on Twitter. Many thanks to Gloria for opening up her home and her talent to me. To find out more about her work head to her website.
It'll be a short blog post today. I'll be on a job site all day, but I'll keep my tumblr and twitter feeds active throughout the day.
Wish me luck...it's a big day!
Good morning everyone. I'm heading down to Washington DC today to being the onsite work for an event I'm lighting. The client is someone I'm sure you've heard of and once the event is over I can share who they are and hopefully tons of photos.
Wish me luck!
Something I'm struggling with lately is articulating the value of solid lighting design to people who've never engaged a lighting designer before. While many first time clients understand the power of light to transform a space and an experience, just as many are skeptical. I often find my pitch to a potential client isn't me versus another lighting designer, it's whether to hire a lighting designer at all.
Lighting designers - how do you make the pitch? What are you doing to grow your opportunities and keep your boards full?
Good morning friends. I just wanted to share my "other" blog with you. It's my tumblr AmazingMrB. This blog is space for my "official" posts on lighting design, and while I sometimes share other's work here, for the most part it's a place for me to share my thoughts with you on good sustainable lighting design.
My tumblr on the other hand is a freer space where I can share (in more than 140 characters) images, links, quotes and short thoughts that keep me inspired and thinking about light throughout the day. If you're on tumblr, take a second and follow me, I'll surely follow you back. If not, feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed.
Thanks!
When one thinks of a beautiful home, there are things that immediately come to mind. An amazing entryway, or perhaps a library with impossibly tall ceilings, a sitting room with bay windows and an ocean view. What rarely comes to mind...closets. I'm not talking about giantic walk-in closets that double as dressing rooms, I'm talking about the simple, humble closet.
Often, it's the closet where people skimp. Why spend money on finish details or good lighting in the closet? I'm going to spend far less time rumaging through it than I will, for instance, in my kitchen.
This is the exact wrong way to think about closet lighting to me. Perhaps your closet will only be open 5% of the time you're home...maybe less. But that's no reason to skimp on high-quality lighting in the closet.
- Closets are where you decide what you're going to wear. High quality lighting it key to choosing the right colors.
- If you're closet is well lit you don't need to turn on every light in the bedroom to choose your clothes. This is particularly useful if you and your spouse are on different schedules.
- If your closet stores more than clothing fully lighting in the interior makes it a lot easier to find things your looking for.
A big part of a home feeling well lit is having light where you need it. Closets are one of those places. You can have the most magnificent chandelier in your entryway, but if the hall closet is dark, your home won't feel well lit. Remember, one of the primary purposes of lighting is simply to see. So how do you light a closet well?
- Angle is everything - I like a closet light mounted at the header of the closet door, throwing light in a wide beam at a 30 - 45 degree angle.
- Bright - I'm not one to over light a space, but closets are not the place to skimp on illumination.
- High CRI - When I specify a closet light I either specify Halogen or High-CRI LED. Color correctness is very important in this application. If you're going with LED look for a color temperature between 3000K and 3500K
Hi Friends.
So it took about 6 hours total (since I posted at 5am EST) to give away 5 copies of Losing Edison. Thank you to everyone who expressed interest. For those of you who missed the giveaway window it's cool. You can find the book for your Kindle here and for your iPhone/iPad here.
I've decided I want to start a conversation around Losing Edison. I want to see what people thought of the book and where they'd like future writing to go. So, I've decided to give away 5 copies of book to the first five people who show interest. How do you show interest well you can:
- Leave a comment below
- Shoot me a message on Twitter
- Shoot me a message on G+
- Shoot me an email
I can only afford to give away five copies. For the sake of not leaving something too open-ended I'm going to stop giving them away on Sunday (though I expect they'll go much sooner than that). One last thing, the book is available on iBookStore from Apple and on Amazon. So if you don't have an iOS device you can read the book on one of the many free Kindle apps. I don't have a sellable PDF and there are no hard copies. Also, you must be willing to share your email address with me since that's how I send you the private code to download the book.
For more on Losing Edison, take a look at the Losing Edison page.
UPDATE
After a few hours, all 5 promotional copies of Losing Edison are spoken for! Thanks, to all those interested!
Thanks guys!
I came across a post on Treehugger the other day by Lloyd Alter, who's a great follow on twitter. Lloyd's piece was titled Selfish is the New Green. He grabs two recent examples of how the traditional green movement is dead. The first is from writer Margaret Wente who writes in Canada's Globe and Mail:
Yet, the problem isn’t that the environmental movement has failed to explain this message. It’s that people have rejected it. Mr. Suzuki fears the consequences for the planet and the human race will be catastrophic. I’m more optimistic. Doomsday cults have been wrong throughout history, and this one will be no exception.
The second point he raises is his recent tour of the Green Living Show in Toronto. Where he encounters lots of sort of green products and ideas but every felt "surreal and half-hearted." The idea is punctuated by a photo of a Porsche with a roof rack for bikes.
It's in the last two paragraphs of the post that I find the he makes his best points and those points should resonate with designers I'll quote them both below then take them individually.
The green movement is dead, and it appears to have been replaced with the Selfish movement. Put solar panels on your roof and make money from the government."It's better than the bank." Eat the right food. "you will live longer, better." Drive the plug-in car. "you will save thousands in fuel costs." It is not about the environment, it's not about the climate, it's all about you.
Peggy is like the rest of us her age, playing a mind game. We know that the worst effects of climate change will happen after we are gone; in the meantime, let's not block our views with turbines or lose that income from those tar sands. Let's stop that quarry that is too close to our hobby farm but dig a hole the size of Florida in Alberta.
This first paragraph is the problem all dyed-in-the-wool environmentalists have when faced with consumer culture. For consumers who have not been fully convinced by the environmental movement (like Margaret Wente) the feel-good nature of green is appealing, but unless the product or service is ultimately better for them than the non-green alternative, they're not going to buy it. I've made the same argument for years when it comes to scaling the sustainability movement in the green environment. The trick isn't to get big companies to build new LEED Gold skyscrapers, it's to get small and medium size businesses to retrofit their space. That comes by convincing them that doing so benefits them now and will effect the bottom line.
In his second paragraph of the quote he's found the problem with this thinking when it's scaled out to a policy level. He calls out aging boomers as a group who are watching climate change happen, but refusing to sacrifice anything to save future generations from the effects.
My take is that we must decouple the green movement as it relates to consumer goods and services from the green movement when it comes to policy agendas. I would argue that we have demand side green only. After all driving an electric car isn't terribly green if it's powered by a coal plant. Demand side green can potentially help conserve resources, but it's not until we see supply-side green, new ways of making and selling energy that we will see any real progress.
As a lighting designer, I think it's my job to find the most sustainable way to accomplish the best lighting design for my client. That means using more effiecient resources, designing with spareness and working with clients to understand how this all ultimately benefits them.
I've been to Times Square hundreds of times. If you deal with midtown you really can't avoid it after awhile. Besides, if you like to see shows, or work on shows, or really want to have anything to do with the entertainment industry, you end up in Times Square. So, as a reflex I'm kind of over it. Last night, I was meeting my girlfriend at an expo she was working on and so there I was, in the heart of Times Square...I looked impressed, no?
That is not the face of someone excited to be where he is.
By now, TV has made everyone aware of what Times Square looks like, so I'm not breaking new ground here. The bottom line - lighting in the traditional sense is gone from the Times Square designscape - it's all screens. It's all messages. That kind of design work is only going to become more prevalent as screens get brighter and cheaper. Here's the thing to remember about screens. They come at you. There is a message built in. Lighting you're facade elegantly versus putting a screen on it is the difference between writing an engrossing novel and making a blockbuster movie. The novel pulls the reader in, it makes them want to experience the story, get to know the characters, live with them for awhile. The blockbuster is a faster experience - the message is sent and then it's gone, onto the next one.
Lighting you're building is no different. Look, I know it's Times Square and once American Eagle has a screen the size of a football field on their facade, you're not going to elegantly light your facade with eight halogen uplights. Intimacy is not at a premium. Yet...
There was this one moment I managed to see and capture. I first noticed the window because it was filled with way too bright, way too glary CFLs in a cold white light that actually made my eyes hurt a little when I saw them, but just as my retinas were about to quit in protest, I saw this guy. He was interested in the merchandise in the window. He wanted to learn more. He got closer to the glass and he read the signs. Now, I'm not suggesting that you stick 18 high wattage CFLs in your window, to the contrary, this lighting was terrible. But it also gave a window, a chance for the viewer to come to it. It didn't announce what it was at first glance like a 15 year old on a tumblr page. It offered a glimpse, then asked you to come in for more...
There's no way to roll back the clock on all the screens that will inundate our lives. It's happening, and the design conscious among us will just have to deal with that. Just remember...there's still a choice. Our buildings shouldn't be giant televisions asking people to sit passively and watch. Even in retail we want visitors to be engaged, to want more, to seek.
Every design is a chance to create intimacy. We must embrace that chance.
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