Outdoor lighting

Outdoor lighting Outdoor lighting is a fun and easy way to give a new look and feel to the outside of your home or business in the evening hours. By following some of these tips, you will see for yourself how doing these things can make you happier and fall in love even more with your lighting.

• Always conceal the light source when garden lighting. You can do this either with a glare guard on the luminaries or by tucking it behind a shrub, a large branch, a wall, or a rock. In an ideal situation, you would like to be ale to see where the outdoor light originates.

• You should avoid putting lights in places that have tall grass or bushy shrubs. The beam of light really needs an unimpeded passage that goes from the fixture all the way to the focal point so that there are no distracting spots of reflected light. However, if you are going for a different mood of a more shadowy or a dimmer light, you should do the exact opposite.

• When you are talking about outdoor lights, don't over light. In this case, less really is more. Extremely bright lighting often gives a garish, theatrical look. Too much light can also make it harder to create a mood in the area. This is especially true because people likely constantly have to squint just to see each other and not go blind from the lights.

• One of the fun things that you can do is to experiment with backlighting. For example, lighting trees that are in the background of a forested area ends up creating silhouettes in the foreground of the area. The same holds true for a lit up hedge behind a shrub or tree.

• Don't try to illuminate every single surface when working with lighting. Shadows are your friend and can work to define lighted areas.

• You certainly can create a different look with the lights you use at night opposed to the light the sun gives in the day. The night view will actually often be much more dramatic than the day view that is provided by the sun.

• You should attempt to take advantage of the many beam angles, frosted lenses and mounts available so that you can adjust your lighting to best accentuate the beauty of your garden.

• If you want to seriously make some nice lighting changes, use the best kind of lights that your budget will allow for. This is an especially good idea if you plan to spend a lot of time outdoors using your lights.

• When you light the deck, you should pay particular attention to where people tend to sit and try to avoid producing a glare. As with deck lights and other garden lights the light source certainly needs to be positioned so that you are not looking directly at the luminaries. This is not only annoying, but also could be damaging to your health.

• Driveway lighting should perform two roles. First it should offer safe access for pedestrians. Secondly, at the same time it needs to light the driveway for vehicles. Either lampposts or small post lights provide an excellent solution and alternative to bigger lights or luminaries.

Click to view cart