I got back a few days ago from most of a week in Palm Springs. I was there at the invitation of Nightscaping®, and it was a welcome opportunity to share ideas with contractors, designers and other lighting professionals from across the U.S. and Canada.
Palm Springs is beautiful this time of year... comfortably warm and mostly dry, but with enough sparse vegetation on the steep rugged slopes that rise out of the desert to catch the glow of the morning sun. There was something magical and about watching the light shift across the rocky ridges and seeing shadowed canyons in between emerge into light.
One of things I've been thinking about since my trip were part of a presentation by a guy named Rod Tapp. Rod is a retired professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture, Cal Poly Pomona. He talked about the dark spaces being as important as the lit ones, and it reminded me of a term I'd heard used to describe works by Italian Renaissance artists such as Caravaggio.
Chiaroscuro, (literally "lightdark" in Italian) describes a bold contrast of light and dark. It's an important concept in painting, and one that also quite naturally extends to the art of outdoor lighting.
So, one of my goals this year is to approach each new job as more of an artist as well as a technician. Left brain-right brain balance I guess.
BTW, new technical developments and prototypes from Nightscaping and GE were presented too, and I feel comfortable saying that sometime in the near future the lighting world is going to change dramatically, with brighter light sources needing less power and lasting much longer in the field.
I predict that high quality, energy conserving LED landscape lighting will be a huge hit before the end of the decade... And that Nightscaping® will continue to be a major player.
