I decided it was time for a second time around for the Nightlights light pollution blog site. Hopefully, it will serve to raise awareness of the problems and dangers to all life caused by light pollution and over-lighting the night. It's a timing thing. Since everything is connected to everything, and with light being one of the most powerful stimuli on Earth, will we eventually learn to pay closer attention to what we do with our lighting? This is not light as a nuisance issue but light as a biological and ecological arranger and orchestrator.
When I started looking into all things lighting, I found myself understanding through my context of audio engineering.
Today, I listened to a Waves webcast with Andrew Scheps, a famous engineer/producer, who did the engineering on hit songs we all know. One of the take-aways was using mid/side EQ. Piano is always a problem in a mix. Piano, at one time or another, covers ALL the available frequencies. Mixes with heavy piano are really tough. It is difficult to find the perfect level where the piano track is up enough in the mix while not masking the guitars, bass, drums, or even vocals. The solution is to use a mid/side EQ. On a piano track, you would cut the piano’s conflicting frequencies in the middle pan, where bass, kick/snare drums and vocals live, and boost those frequencies on the left/right sides. Now, the piano can be heard at a lower level, doesn’t mask or hide the other instruments, and makes a good mix easier to reach. Everything can be heard and the mix has a beautiful clarity to it.
How does this apply to lighting design? I would suggest that instead of lighting up a whole landscape with brilliant lighting, one can dim lights, use other CCT’s, or even do away with luminaires where they have no real use or purpose, and put focused light on specific targets. Such a strategy would render a better solution, provide clarity for vision, performance, and true safety.
When you brilliantly light everything, a lighting design becomes just like a bad audio mix. When everything is lit the same, contrast is lost, intelligibility is lost. Important details are lost in the blaze of light. Poor lighting design is just like a mix where everything is just too loud and intelligibility is lost. Nothing stands out. It’s just loud and certainly not pleasurable to listen to. Things like pedestrians, road obstacles, crosswalks, dangers should be illuminated at night, maybe even with different CCT lighting to help them stand out. Surrounding those important targets should be lit differently to increase the contrast. Pedestrians, walkways, dangers need to be the focus of illumination, not the side of buildings, landscape and certainly not the sky.
Today’s lighting strategy is to just make everything brighter and brighter, louder and louder, then we’ll be able to see everything and we’ll all be safe. That is so very wrong. Such a strategy certainly doesn’t work in audio production and I don’t believe it works in lighting design either.
Light well and prosper! (Please stay well and safe, everybody)
I believe professional lighting makes things way, way too complex. Common sense can lead to easy solutions for many lighting problems. As they say, sometimes, one can’t see the forest for the trees.
Table lamps are a common element at everyone’s house. Initially, light bulbs were clear. As the filiments got brighter, they weren’t pleasant to look at because of the bright light source intensity. The lighting industry started frosting the inside of the bulb to spread the emission from the filament over a larger surface area which also made the light from the bulb more consistent.
Because of the glare from the lamp, people put shades over the light. This is to remove the direct glare from our eyes and to direct the light to where we want it. The inside of the shade is reflective, so it also takes light that would be wasted and directs it to where it is needed. This is a common solution for our home lighting.
A light like in leftmost picture, a lamp without a shade, is putting less than 30% of the light where it is needed. In the picture on the right, the same lamp, sporting a nice shade to properly direct the light, 90% of the light is directed downward to the required task area and primary purpose. The level of the light can be reduced by 2/3 and get the same amount of ‘real’ task light by using proper shielding.
So why do we do outside lighting like this?
In the above picture, 70% of the light and the energy used to produce it is wasted. The lights at these commercial sites are at this level all night, with no one there. Is this good common sense?
In this case, even if they left it on all night long, they could save 70% of the electric bill and have the exact same amount of light on their product as they have now. At the same time, the owners would reduce their carbon footprint and reduce the ecological impact of their lighting by a significant amount. Using adaptive lighting to reduce levels or even turn most lighting off after hours would yield significant savings and therefore increase profit. This is common sense, isn’t it?
Night Lights 