Beautifully designed lighting plays an essential part in creating a mood or accenting your surroundings. Here are some illuminating ideas and techniques to help you set the tone of your wedding reception.
Landscape Lighting
Special event planners routinely rent lighting gear for garden weddings and outdoor receptions since decorative candles and soft lighting add a magical touch at night.
Torches: Torchieres generally have metal bases that easily pierce turf or soil, making them easy to set up. If you love the look of an open flame, tiki torches are a wonderful option for lighting up an outdoor space. These party favorites always cast a festive glow and are widely available at home and garden centers.
Luminarias: To make this traditional lantern, fill a lunch-sized paper bag with a few inches of sand and place a votive candle on top. Commonly seen in the southwest during winter holidays, these beautiful, simple creations are surprisingly elegant and ethereal.
Net lighting: Tiny lights blinking on low bushes and shrubs will captivate your guests. Take the look up a level by wrapping sparkling nets around tree trunks, poles, and columns.
Pin Spots: These set the industry standard for spot-lighting tabletops, cake tables, and props. A pin spot is a light focused very tightly on a small area and can project a focused straight beam up to 100 feet. Mount two pin spots, each of a different color, in opposite corners of a space. The beams of light can be adjusted to intersect at a specific point of interest, like the top of the wedding cake.
Dramatic Tools
If your celebration demands high drama, you can rent specialized lighting equipment from a company that will also provide installation and operational services.
Silks: Silk diffusion filters stretch light in one direction. Silks create very dramatic effects, especially when used to highlight long or tall spaces. Silks are the perfect effect to highlight a dramatic staircase entrance.
Par-16 Lights: Short for Parabolic Aluminized Reflector Lamp, these versatile lamps are great for reception tents and ballrooms. They can create concentrated splashes of light or bathe a whole area in soft color. Par-16 lights are small enough to illuminate hard-to-reach places like small trees, centerpieces, and floral arrangements.
Gobos: Gobos are stencil-like patterns mounted over small spotlights. They come in all sorts of patterns -- leaves, water ripples, window frames, not to mention your own custom designs. The gobo image becomes enlarged when it's "thrown" onto a wall or floor.