Lighting

When we think of lighting, we tend to think in very broad terms.  When we enter our home at night with our family, we don't say "turn on the lamp" upon entering the dark room.  We say "turn on the light". Light is light.  It's all the same.  Well, you may find this a bit surprising, but there are more kinds of lighting than you can possibly imagine.  Need some examples?  No problem. 

Yes, there is the common lamp light that we enjoy in our homes.  But even lamp lighting has its variations.  Just to keep this at the most simplistic level, your common house lamp is basically a turn on and turn off deal.  The common bulb for your lamp will have just one wattage.  But then there are lamps and bulbs that have multiple wattages, usually in threes.  A three way bulb, as it is called, will usually have wattage's of 50, 100 and 150 watts.  There are several variations however, with wattage's going up to as high as 250 watts for the common house lamp.  These different wattages give varying degrees of brightness in your lighting. 

Staying within the home, there are your kitchen lights, which are a whole different kind of lighting system.  Kitchen lights usually use florescent light bulbs that are in a circular shape and run off of a starter and ballast.  If either the starter or the ballast go bad, the light itself won't work, even if the light itself is still good.  So, this throws a bit of a monkey wrench into our lighting system. 

And then there is of course the tiny night light.  These are the lights that our kids use at night because they're afraid to sleep in the dark.  Night lights usually plug into the wall and come in interesting designs like cartoon characters and the like.  The wattage of a night light is about 15 watts, which provides very low lighting.  It's enough to keep the kid from freaking out but not enough to keep him awake all night. 

Leaving the home, there's professional lighting.  One form of professional lighting is a photographer's lighting.  Professional photographers use many forms of lighting when taking photos of their subjects.  Flood lighting is very commonly used, but there are other forms.  Some photographers use various colored lighting or even strobe lighting on their subjects to get some very interesting effects. 

If you ever walked into most traditional reformed churches, you'll find that their fellowship rooms, which are quite large in some cases, use these long florescent lights.  You'll probably find at least a dozen or so of these hanging from the ceiling.  Maintaining these lights is not easy as these ceilings are usually pretty high up.  Unless you've got a maintenance man in the congregation, you pretty much have to call somebody to change these. 

The above examples don't even scratch the surface of all the different kinds of lighting that there are.  And of course, let's not forget the most important lighting of all.  Natural lighting from our sun.  Without that, we wouldn't have any lighting at all.