Turn off the lights ! - It's beautiful.

After a storm at Arches National Park

I have always loved the lighting that occurs when the sky is dark from a recent storm and the sun is out behind me shining dramatically on the foreground.  It's spectacular and beautiful.  In portrait photography too, working with contrasts of light and shadow can produce beautiful and striking images (if the camera can handle it).

Even though I know this, I hadn't thought much about how that quality of light might affect my use of household lights until I was at a meeting last week in our fellowship hall at church.  I'm not a big fan of meeting in that space.  It's a big room with florescent lighting above and bare walls - rather blah. I often have trouble understanding other people when they speak as their voices seem to disappear (that's my hearing issue at work).

We were a small group - maybe 10 or so - of people gathered to talk about our next steps in working to slow climate change and there we were in that big room with all of those lights on.  I got up and went to the row of switches, turning them off until only the lights above our table remained.  When I went back to the table and sat down, I was actually amazed about how much more pleasant it was!  With a dark room around us and lights above us, I had created that dramatic lighting you see in the photo above.  Our space became more cozy and the light that remained over us appeared more brilliant.   My table mates' faces were sharper and easier to see without a lot of excess light behind them and it was easier for me to hear, probably because I could read lips more easily.  So there you go.  I saved some electricity and created a nicer space at the same time.  I love examples that show changing our lifestyle to use less carbon can be a nice thing for us as well as for the environment.

Turning off lights at home is already a well used practice for us - enough so that I hardly think about it. I just turn off lights if I'm not in a room.  It shows on our energy usage too.  Electricity use is the one area where we actually perform better than our most efficient neighbors!  Yay!.  I wish I could say the same thing for our use of gas.  Not so good there.

For a background link, I looked for statistics on the carbon imprint of turning off the lights.  For all of the talk about switching to CFL's, there wasn't much about just not using the lights to begin with, which seems to me to make even more sense.  I did find this great link though, which is a teaching outline for junior high on personal carbon use.  It's a great outline and even comes with test questions and statistics to use in your computations.  Try it out - might be fun.  Oh, and the statistic for turning off your lights is:  Turning off unneeded lights could be a savings of 376 pounds of CO2 emissions per year (similar to air drying your clothes for six months).  Of course, everyone's electricity use differs. so here is the basic statistic to use in your own computation:  Electricity to run lights and appliances - 1.64 lbs of CO2 per kWh. (kilowatt hour)

Here's the link:  Reducing Personal CO2 Emmissions