By PETER MURRAY

Get the light right, not because landscape lighting makes it easy and safe for you to amble through after dark, but also because well-lighted entrances, driveways and walkways connote hospitality.

They also allow for identification of visitors and dampen the spirit of trespassers. Besides, you should also light up steps, stepping-stones and passageways, between buildings, for added safety. In addition, specific outdoors should be made to glow with light during dark hours.

Illuminating Safety

Illuminating areas for safety, and security, and drawing attention to important features in your landscape, is important, yes. However, you’d need to give enough thought as to how best you’d keep glare away. You should never have lights at eye level — five feet for standing adults, and 3 1/2 feet for sitting areas and areas accessible by wheelchair — because glare does not enhance visibility; rather, it reduces it. Also, remember, you should have people in mind when you think of landscape lighting and/or design.

Outdoor Charm

Photo Courtesy: www.knselectric.net

When your garden is lit up, it extends a sense of radiance on to your landscape during the evening hours. The idea also helps you to bring that exquisite outdoor charm well within — especially when you illuminate specimen trees and shrubs, sculptures, water features, or interesting structural characteristics — it’s also a joyful sight you’d relish from your windows and doors.

It is ideal to use indirect lighting in landscape lighting, not direct “head-on” lighting. The former is achieved when the light source is hidden from view. Result: only the lighting effects are seen. In so doing, you’d also add spice to your landscape with techniques such as down-lighting, up-lighting, silhouette-lighting, shadow-lighting, cross-lighting, and graze-lighting. What’s more, a fusion of these could be used in just one design.

You’d use down-lighting straight down on to objects to be illuminated. Besides, you’d use it close to the ground to provide indirect light to walkways and steps. Needless to say, it can also be positioned above patios, or play areas, and to light them up with excellent effect. The outcome? The larger the area, the better the sublime effect of such lighting.

You’d formulate up-lighting by positioning the light below the object to be illuminated — especially, when you wish to draw attention to plants, or objects. However this maybe, ground level lights, for up-lighting, should be kept away from direct view by plants, the light fixture, and/or by skewing them away from the direction of view.

Silhouette. Shadow

You could create silhouette- and shadow-lighting by lighting objects from one side, and also emphasising on the form of the objects, or plants, you are illuminating. The best form of silhouette-lighting is achieved by lighting the background — e.g., a fence or wall — so the dark object is viewed against an illuminated surface and/or by back lighting the object, so it is viewed against a dim backdrop.

Cross-Lighting

When you use lighting for an object from opposite directions, it is called cross-lighting. It could be used either from front-to-back, or side-to-side. To derive better results, make sure that light fixtures are positioned near the ground, and the light intensities from the two composites are, by and large, diverse. When you use lighting to detail the textured surface of objects, it is called graze-lighting. It is ideal to accentuate the exterior siding of a house by “masking” lights in a shrub and/or directing the light to “grace” the wall… as it were.

It ain’t as difficult as it appears to be — yes, you can handle with both flair and élan. If it is, no need to scout around, or lose your sleep on it. There are a host of electrical companies that are into landscape lighting. Just tell them what you want, and the rest would be a breeze — to enjoy your landscape all through the day and night.

Most important. If you wish to direct the type of indirect lighting to highlight your interesting features, the texture, size and growth habit of plants, should be taken into account. It is best to consider up-lighting for plants that are open. Also, you’d think of cross-lighting at sharp angles for thick foliage.

What’s more, you’d relate best to landscape lighting by bringing out the texture and shapes of objects and plants to be illuminated.

What are you waiting for? Savour the ambience — in mind, body, and spirit — right away.