Do you know who is benefitting from LED lighting? Major cities.
Do you know whom else? Hollywood.
First, Forbes Magazine is reporting the city of Los Angeles will save about $7 million a year in energy costs, plus another $2.5 million a year in maintenance, because it switched its street lighting to LED. The city says the program has reached a point where it is now paying for itself without any impact to its general budget.
The city’s website reports The LED Streetlight Replacement Program has replaced more than 140,000 existing streetlight fixtures in the city with LED units over a four year period. The expected savings of the new lights has exceed the initial program goals. The city’s website also calls the program a shining example of how green technology can be both environmentally responsible and cost effective. With the LED program, the city says it has transformed the night landscape of the City of Los Angeles, made the city safer and pedestrian friendly at night, and have exceeded the initial program goals on both energy efficiency and CO2 reductions.
But there is more, because now Hollywood has taken notice. According to the website Gizmodo, the LED lighting takes away the yellow hue from previous street lighting, and is giving Los Angeles a whole new look. One writer says, “Hollywood will never look the same.”
The photo on the left shows the old way Hollywood street scenes would look at night, and the photo on the right shows how LED lighting is changing the film industry.
While Hollywood film makers can always fix the lighting in post-production, the fact is LED lighting allows the original colors to appear, when traditional lighting would not allow those colors to even be put on film in the first place. ‘The interesting thing about non-tungsten artificial light sources,” Hollywood writer Dave Kendricken points out, “is that they often produce a non-continuous or incomplete spectral output. This can affect the appearance of certain colors under that output. More simply, you can’t really put colors back in that weren’t there to begin with, even by gelling such a light source or color correcting in post.”
The LED transition is also happening in New York City right now, where many other nighttime movie scenes are shot. Gizmondo says if we want to change the film industry, then ironically one of the fastest and most all-encompassing ways to do so is to change how our cities are lit.
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