The Importance Of Lighting At Your Wedding

I can't emphasize enough to my clients how important it is to have the right lighting for their wedding. What is considered the right lighting? That depends on your wedding venue, the mood you want to create, the time of day your wedding will take place, as well as many other factors. It is important to work with a professional, experienced lighting designer to help you assess all of these factors and design the perfect lighting to fit your event.

In a nutshell, everyone wants to look and feel good, and creating the perfect ambient lighting at your wedding can certainly help with that. Think of the times you had fun at a particular club, or felt especially eerie at a haunted house. Besides the music, the main influencer is the type of lighting that was set to infuse a specific mood. It's the same for weddings and events. When you walk into a room full of candlelights, it naturally evokes the feeling of romance and warmth, doesn't it?

Lighting also enhances all the beautiful elements you incorporate at your wedding. Beautiful floral arrangements are brought to live when illuminated by a pinspot. A soft wash or pattern across the dance floor gives it texture and dimension, and makes for amazing photographs. Vibrant, moving pinspots on the band certainly raises the crowd's energy level by many notches. These are just a few examples of the way lighting can impact your wedding in the most magical ways.

Event lighting can certainly be costly, especially if you are looking to transform a large room with lots of special lighting and hanging pieces, such as crystal chandeliers. A lot of what you pay for goes into the labor. For those who don't often get to see the behind the scenes production of a wedding, I can assure you that setting up lighting and drapery is definitely hard labor. Nothing is ever as easy as it looks, and lighting, in particular, is MUCH harder to set up correctly than you would think. It takes a lot of manpower, especially when there is a limited window of time to set up a space, and lighting technicians need to be skilled at moving and setting up complex, fragile pieces of equipment around all the other vendors that are trying to set up. It is also common for them to be the last people to leave after breaking down for an event.

Below are some pictures of the fabulous San Francisco based Enhanced Lighting team in production for one of our weddings at San Francisco City Hall last year:

Careful precision is required to make sure each drapery piece is balanced well with the rest of the other pieces

Bulky lighting equipment can sometimes take 2+ hours just to load in, before they can start setting up! The type of lighting equipment required for your event would be determined by your venue and your wedding design.

See how the lighting and draping were key components in transforming this room into a sexy, sophisticated lounge for dancing and dessert after dinner?

Without the lighting, you would not have been able to see the beautiful sparkles
of the crystals hanging from the branches

I love how lighting can hide the things that make a space unattractive, and enhance/highlight the elements that we want to show off. It's definitely become a necessity for ALL of our events, big or small, and we really hope that every couple can see the importance of hiring a professional lighting company like Enhanced Lighting. Thank you to the entire Enhanced Lighting team for always going above and beyond for us and our clients at our events!

I do realize that not everybody can have the budget for lots of lighting and draping. However, I would encourage you to not eliminate it altogether. Work with your planner and the lighting company to concentrate the lighting efforts on a few areas for your wedding space that would make the most impact. Even simple uplighting around the parameter of a space, or drapery for the main entryways can make a big difference.

The New York Times had an excellent article on this topic as well! Be sure to check it out!