Creating Ambiance with Candles and Lighting

and so Valentine's Day is quickly approaching and for those of you who don't like Valentine's Day or don't believe in it, I don't know why you're watching this episode, but the rest of you will love it. Now Valentine's Day often conjures up thoughts of flowers and chocolates and all that, but it also conjures up the idea of ​​a romantic dinner, a romantic event of some sort, and of course, candlelight, and now I'm being enlightened. by the light of the

candles

. an atmosphere that you just don't get with traditional

lighting

, but of course this is the way not to do it, maybe it would be cool if there was a storm coming up and it was a romantic evening and the power had gone out and I.

I'm having dinner or cuddling with this special someone, but right now I'm trying to produce a video for my wonderful audience, so let's add a little more light to the situation. Yes, a little more light and they will be able to see me, but no. That's enough, so we'll add a little more because, well, you need to be able to see me to be able to demonstrate some things, but this is a nice environment that you could really use if you were going to use that guy. of ambience,

lighting

and dimmers for your special event, so okay, let's go with a little more light and you can see me and everything is ready, so Valentine's Day is coming up, it's actually Saturday, depending on when you are seeing this. episode, you might have a couple of days or you haven't said it tomorrow or a couple of hours to prepare now.

Valentine's Day, of course, conjures up, as I said, these thoughts about chocolates, red wine, and I don't happen to have roses, but of course, Valentine's Day is important for another reason: it's a time to celebrate your love. for someone special. It can even be love for a friend. Some people actually say that they have nothing special to do on Valentine's Day or that they are single. Well, you can just call. Call a friend and say hello, let's go to dinner and that can be a wonderful gesture in itself, not necessarily romantic, but just a wonderful gesture, so at the end of the day you want to create something that's romantic, let's say If we're going to to have a wonderful event for that special someone, the key is not to go overboard and many people like us just had it outdoors where I literally had nothing except

candles

lighting me up and the rest of this room was too ambient where basically, you can't even see, like going to a restaurant and you can't read the menu and you have to turn off the light on your phone or the camera or the flash or whatever, it's just too much for what you want. have the right amount of light for the situation and there are multiple ways to do it, obviously candles are some of the answers we haven't really discussed lighting before, but since it's a lighting show, it wouldn't be a good host and No.

It would give you good information if it didn't include candles and fire. Now of course you have to be careful with that so if you have kids, pets, whatever, be careful before lighting candles or better yet you can use LED candles. so let's go ahead and for the moment let's assume that we're going to create our, you're going to create some kind of romantic dinner. We'll just say that's kind of generic, but I can describe this very easily and you'll notice. Well, I don't really have a dining room. If you've seen the other photos of this space, I moved from a larger space to a smaller space and in the upcoming episodes we'll be able to compare and contrast the larger and smaller space.

The spaces where you used to have a dining room don't have one anymore, so we're going to go ahead and take a look at where you used to have a dining room and your very small dining table for two and it's obviously very well lit, it's not very romantic. and now here it is in a more mantic sense where they create more atmosphere through the appropriate use of lighting. Now you'll say, well, how does that work? My idea is that you put less light on the table, like the dining rooms. Usually there will be some type of light coming from the ceiling, whether it's a recessed light or a chandelier or some type of pendant light, maybe or a couple of those that you want to turn down.

We have talked about very economical dimmers if not. You don't have home automation systems and special apps and things like that, you don't need them, just go to your hardware store. Aim at whatever and get some sort of basic rotating demo or something you can use to adjust that light and preferably if you can do it with the rest of the lights in the room, if there are even such things in your room you better want to have it turned off. The main light drops on your table by 30 to 35 percent. Now in this image you can see a little. a little bit brighter than it actually is and it had to be done for the camera to pick it up correctly and show you the contrast between the brighter lights around the room and the lower lights on the table, so you really want to create it a little bit . a little bit lower than what you're seeing here, what it allows you to do is see your special someone, see maybe whatever you're going to serve them and well, if you were in a restaurant, you could read the menu and what What I would do is make sure all the other lights in the room are off when you do this, so set the main light to about 30%, just a nice brightness that you can see the table and it's not so ridiculously dark, let's just go back . to the other one and I can do a demonstration, so if you want to have a little bit of brightness, we'll probably raise it a little bit higher than this for the table, so you can see the table and see the items that are on it.

You're not necessarily going to read the newspaper, but you get the idea, so you want to add light around the room if you already have lights and you can dim them, maybe 50 to 55, 60 percent, you know, two-thirds you don't. to be exact with the numbers, it will allow you to have light that comes from other parts of the room and then balances forward and bounces off the dining space, off the table, etc., and that creates light without it being so harsh and overwhelming and because then you have light coming from all over the room and some light falling from the ceiling onto the table, then you have a wonderful romantic setting and it doesn't seem too overwhelming, so I'll bring it up, bring us here to where we were, so you can say, well, what kind of lights are you talking about?

Well, I really love using uplights and downlights and soft lighting and in this other space I had these two downlights coming down crisscross. the wall and the light was coming in through the special fabric panels that I bought from Ikea and it was kind of a really cool three dimensional hanging piece of art and there were some around the room as well, there were also some lights on so those lights went up 50 percent or so and then the main chandelier, so to speak, came down in the '30s and really created something wonderful. Now you see, of course, on the table, I have a candle, it's just a little one of these old ones. guys, and those are good for many different purposes, these are basically tea light holders, they can even be candle holders etc, and they come in many colors and sizes.

You've seen them if you're out and about and I have several of them and a couple of different colors didn't really bring that message so it's a challenge but I have a different one so let's talk about candles for the table setting. I like to use something that I have had this for a while. I like to use something like this. Here's a closeup. I'm actually into it and it's wonderful because you can create a mood and shine beyond what turns off your chandelier and you when you turn it off. candles and light them, you'll probably need to adjust the lighting to compensate, so you want to make sure the candles shine and don't get lost in the light bathing the area, the table, and yourself, honestly. from the rest of the room or the light falling on your table, so let's show that I like lighting candles with these scripto devices because it's easier than lighting matches, but do what you want, it's very easy to light these guys, so now if I lower With the lighting here and we go back to a little bit more darkness, you'll see that if these are forward here, about table height, it will project and depending on what you know, obviously you're not going to have these.

Right in your face it's not going to be something strange, you know, telling scary stories around a campfire, but they add and you can see it, in fact, you can see it here on the couch, you can see it again if I upload it here. it adds that glow, that wonderful burning glow that we just can't get from LED lights from incandescent lights, it's that wonderful candle fire glow, which we talked about actually in episode one, we talked about the origin of light , the sun, the fire and all that. things, but this is something that is very important to use now if you don't like using real candles, um, like I said, this is a great type of little candle holder, it lets you know that they are little clear cups basically and they hold tea lights, too you can put little votive candles in there and you can have any type of centerpiece you want, maybe with pillar candles or even floating candles that would be in a small bowl or a small clear bowl with drinking water. but if you don't like going back to using regular candles, if you have kids or there's some kind of regulation or you can't use them in your house or our apartment or something like that, of course you can also get these little ones and here's a close up of these In action these little LED candles or flameless candles, basically electronic candles, restaurants of any kind are starting to use them to avoid the costs of dealing with real cane in fuel and so on associated with it and the safety factor. but these are great and this one is a couple years old and tries to make a little flame but it's not as good and the newer ones are better but these last a long time and are pretty good so now you have an idea. what to do, but again, since we're talking about exaggerating, people can exaggerate, you might say, "wow, I can." I have a couple of days.

You could get home automation. I could get dimmers. You could get the Philips Hue bulbs and you could create something romantic and crazy. scene now there might be some people who want to do that and use all kinds of crazy colored lights and music and all that and I don't know who those people would be but anyway let's talk about not using colored lights correctly now I dedicated an episode of this , so I don't need you to stop here, but we're going to put a little link somewhere on the screen and you can click on it and watch our episode on colored lights so you can see, I've been enlightened since Well, I don't.

I've done everything now, right? Sometimes home automation doesn't work so well, so we'll try that silly trick again. I'm out there. Yes, this is a live production, so you can see someone lighting up. Red isn't necessarily the best idea in the world because the right human skin tones aren't terrible, but the other colors like blue and such just don't work well with human skin tones and you know you could do something like this. You know, a Philips Hue bulb has a different light around your house, a lot of different lights, but it's really overkill and it's just not necessary.

What I like to do with colored lights is accentuate, accentuate, accentuate and I don't even mean to put it on like a normal lamp that looks silly, it's like you have a red light district or there's an alarm about to go off again, maybe Maybe your house caught on fire, you know, and some of the LED lights out there that Philips and the lifx actually claim can turn all the lights on correctly if your smoke detector detects them right, in which case just leave of the house, but anyway, back to back, to this red light, blue light, green light, you know, whatever is not the best. in human skin tones so use it as an accent you can only do it with red you can do it with purple let's see what it would look like purple probably isn't that good and let me do this quickly so I don't get bored scrolling to these things and here we'll go to purple, yeah, it's not that good and maybe even the blue, you know, it's actually not that good, there's not the blue either, but let's bring it back to the way we had it before and it will change here in a second and hopefully , the other did the wonderful and lovely thing when everything works, so human skin tones and colors are not always a big thing, so use small decorative lights use lights use one of my favorite places of course it's economical and allows you to experiment. very easily it's IKEA, they have all kinds of little lights and you can put colored lights inside, they are white, you can get the ones that already have the colored lampshades, they are really cool and of course the Valentine's Day colors. think purples, reds and pinks and those are the defaults, you could use blue, but blue is maybe the sad color, you could use oranges, warm colors, stay away from greens and things like that don't make any sense, maybe some yellows and golds for Do a couple of things different and you could use them as ambient lighting, but not too much, don't go overboard, no, don't use more than 30% of your lighting as accent or color lighting, it's just not recommended, So now it's time for you to get going.

I have given yousome great ideas and some initial ways to make your event romantic or whatever you want.I will make on Valentine's Day something that looks really wonderful with an atmosphere that is not over the top and you can enjoy a wonderful time with whoever you meet. Whatever, and even if you decide to spend Valentine's Day alone, you can create wonderful moments. beyond just for you of course this is an answer enlightenment and our next episode will actually be a question and answer session as we start monthly to have a question and answer session with all the questions and comments that come in and I love them.

Keep sending us your questions. you can ask that two questions in answers point of enlightenment you can comment on the videos find us on social media all that good stuff I love it and we're going to do the monthly questions and answers so that all the others that I already answered everyone else can have the benefit of get those answers and we'll delve into other interesting topics, lighting, lighting, you know, light bulb reviews, LEDs and of course home automation and some home styles like this so I hope you have a wonderful Valentine's Day , whatever it is, and if you create something that looks really amazing and has a wonderful vibe, take a photo and send it to that same email address; you can use it for anything, not just questions and answers. lighting, so I'm going to create a little atmosphere for myself right here in the home studio and I wish you all a wonderful, beautifully lit Valentine's Day, whatever you decide to do.

I'm Jody Ganser for lighting answers. and I'll talk to you next time