Outdoor decorative lighting can make a dramatic improvement to your nightime landscape. It also provides safety and security to your home.
Basically you need to first create a lighting plan (see Planning Outdoor Lighting), decide what areas you want to light, where you want to create highlights, set your budget and then install the outdoor lights.
In most cases, a simple outdoor lighting system where you are using low voltage, or solar outdoor lights is a project that you can complete in a weekend.
Outdoor Lighting Fixtures
There is a huge range of lighting fixtures you can choose from, in a wide range of styles.
Most likely you will choose an overall theme for your outdoor decorative lighting, probably in tune with the style of your home. Then you can choose outdoor lights that fit into that theme.
There are modern lights, ultra-modern, art deco lights, traditional lights and so on.
Outdoor & landscape Lighting Styles:
Accent Lighting
With this style, you use spotlights or minispreads to generate intense light that is focused on a specific object to contrast it against a dark background.
Spread Lighting
This style uses so-called spread fixtures to create circular patterns of light to highlight items such as flowers and low shrubs from above.
Downlighting
With downlighting you usually use spotlights, floodlights and spread light fixtures mounted high up, either on a wall or in a tree and then aimed downwards to create a soft and romantic feeling.
Uplighting
As you would expect, uplighting is the opposite of downlighting and uses fixtures that are surface or ground mounted and angled upward to highlight a feature. This technique uses spotlights, floodlightss, or in-ground light fixtures.
Cross Lighting
With cross lighting, the fixtures - usually spotlights or floodlights - are mounted on the side of a tree, feature wall, or arbor to reveal detail and soften shadows.
Silhouetting
With silhouetting, you normally use spotlights, floodlights, or in-ground light fixtures to light the surface behind an object to create a striking effect.
A variation on silhouetting is “grazing”, where you use a beam of light that just grazes the surface of an object to reveal its texture.
Enjoy!
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