Lighting is pretty important. As Sui fell asleep for the umpteenth time on the couch, struggling to stay awake against a dim standing light (1), it was time to renovate the lighting in my condo. I also tried poking her awake and got slapped.
Like almost everybody else, I switched my incandescent bulbs for energy-saving CFL’s, courtesy of multiple government subsidies, a few years back. Sure, there was a difference in lighting, but I didn’t think much of it till now; some rudimentary research showed that stores still sold high wattage bulbs, used in higher-end lamps, at a performance level unattainable by current CFL’s. Also, there were supposedly added benefits to using halogens and full-spectrum lighting as well, and that fluorescent flicker people complain about is probably keeping me irritable.
It got me thinking about the effect light has on mood. Intro. to Computer Graphics: light source and ambiance drastically change the feel of a scene; it’s the same lesson learned in photography and cinema, and this little girl would agree. We have Daylight Savings to trick us into additional productivity, pale fluorescent tubes to keep us awake in the office, and bright floodlights to allow food to glisten in the kitchen.
Anyway, my first step was to check out Ikea and Target. Known for cheap but convenient lighting solutions, they proved their reputation with a selection of cheap (affordable?) bulbs and flimsy stands (flexible?) wobbling to each shopper footstep (earthquake prepared?). It turned out that the now-shattered lamp I bought from Ikea was the high-end torchiere floor lamp, and others looked far worse and featured a wimpy yellow flicker.
With the cheap route unsatisfactory, the lazy route remained viable: I went online to the likes of Lamps USA for more options. They have a good amount of impressive-looking models with fine sample pictures, but if anything the Ikea experience encouraged me to see it in person, to gauge the lumins necessary to keep my living room bright and friendly. I headed down to San Mateo’s Lamps Plus for a closer look.
‘Twas a rare sight, a single young guy in a lamp store. Whereas most of the customers were couples (initiated by the wife, from the looks of it) looking for antique lamps to flesh out their aged decor, I was running around looking for some kind of modern lighting, basically anything without a topless statuette as a lampbase. Sadly, design modernity demanded gnarly lampposts with multiple tentacles sprayed in irregular directions, or panels of flashingly bright bulbs minimally diffused with plastic or cloth covers.
That is, for $300 and above, I’d be paying for the privilege of burning half a dozen light bulbs, shrouded so to not completely render the owner sightless, looking not much better than the one bulb solution.
Which led me back back to finding the right bulb for the lamps I already have; a fancy lamppost doesn’t affect its output, and if I put $300 towards a few bulbs they would probably satisfactorily melt any stray eyeballs. I settled on a full-spectrum lighting bulb for computing purposes (2), and replaced a few chosen lamps with bright halogen bulbs.
I earned mad lighting geek cred.
- then again, she does have really early morning classes and clinic responsibilities (↩)
- I used an Eclipse light before, and have a similar lamp for my monitor in the office (↩)
Did I really slap you? I don’t remember any more. Sorry babe.
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