This is post #1 in our series, ‘Five Things you need to know about LED Lighting’. To learn more about the five things you need to know, we’ll be giving a free workshop today (Monday, October 31), at the ASLA conference in San Diego.

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Lighting designers will be the first to tell you, an improved visual experience does not necessarily mean more light.  Footcandles, or Lux in the metric world, do not tell the whole story and lumen output only matters if you put it where it’s needed.  A truly great visual experience involves vertical illuminance and the human interaction with color rendering, a proper level of contrast, and a minimum amount of glare.  Because LED lighting is controllable, it is possible to design a more optimal system for a great visual experience.

To this point we’ve all seen examples of an over lit space.  Occupants of the space feel like they are on a stage performing in the spotlight because in the name of security someone has decided more footcandles must be better.  Perhaps it was a lighting engineer adding light to boast of uniformity ratios more extreme than recommended standards.  Regrettably, these decisions may make vision and security more difficult.  The unwanted adaptation of your eye will make vision beyond the space and into the surrounding areas more difficult and the lack of contrast minimizes object detection.

The goal of outdoor lighting should not be to turn night into day.  Outdoor lighting occurs during a time when the receptors in your eyes are naturally adapting from photopoic vision to mesopic vision.  Using moonlight as inspiration for a better solution, we believe that outdoor lighting should mimic the minimal glare, spectral color, and level of contrast naturally present at night.