First dance with uplighting, tree candles, and texture lighting.
Hotel ballrooms are designed to hold business meetings, weddings, corporate holiday parties, conferences, and any other number of events. Hotel ballrooms aren’t designed to look amazing for every event, they are designed to be nice enough to not notice the room itself.
Or you might have the opposite end of the spectrum with the hotel that went headstrong into branding the room with a very specific design style that most likely does not fit your event decor (we’re looking at you kaleidoscope carpet Marriott’s). That’s where the lighting comes in.
DIY, Outside Vendor, Hotel’s Vendors?
You have three options when considering lighting for your event. The most cost effective is DIY, using outside vendors is generally next expensive, or you can use the hotel’s recommended lighting vendor.
DIY lighting can be easy to transform a ballroom if you have the time and people to do it.
Leveraged DIY is an option that people don’t always consider. Use another one of your vendors, florist, planner, DJ, drape company to setup the lighting for you. They will already be there at your event and you can save on the labor costs that way. We’re more than happy to work with them so that you get the effect that you are looking for.
Outside vendors are usually the next best cost effective option. Expect to pay a premium for having someone come out, set up the lighting, come up with the lighting design, and make sure everything runs smoothly. Weddingwire.com is a great resource for finding lighting vendors and we usually send people there when looking for a vendor in their area.
Hotel ballroom before and after lighting.
Hotel lighting can be a very expensive endeavor. Not only do you have to pay for the lighting company, but you pay for the lighting company to rent space at the hotel to house their equipment, you pay for the hotel management, you pay a fee for having the hotel recommend the lighting to you, and you pay service charges on all of that. Hospitality speak it’s what ever the cost is plus plus.
From our price comparisons you’ll end up paying about a 35% to 55% premium to have the hotel provide lighting or A/V services for your event.
What Lighting Do I Need?
Before and after lighting in a smaller hotel ballroom.
By the time you are done planning your event you’ll be an expert in lighting. A good place to start is this article types of event lighting?that walks you through each step of types of lighting and what it creates.
Think of lighting as a way to enhance the features and design elements in your space and deemphasize elements that you don’t like. Hate the carpet and chairs? Use uplighting to draw guests eyes up and use texture lighting to add interest higher up on the walls so guests won’t notice the carpet or chairs. Then use candles or centerpiece lighting on tables to add extra light to each of the tables and draw guests eyes away from the elements you don’t like.
Find out how many uplights you’ll need?using our online uplighting calculators.
What Can Lighting Do?
Lighting can go a long ways to change elements of the room that can be very expensive to otherwise fix. Some elements it can fix are:
Big Space – Hotel ballrooms are notoriously large and cavernous devoid of feeling. Lighting helps warm the cold space up and helps make it more inviting.
Boring Walls / Air Walls – Airwalls and boring walls are perfect for texture lighting. Create the pattern and design that matches your other decorations on your walls with light.
Carpet – The entire floor is covered in it, uplights can fix them by bringing peoples eyes higher or changing the color of the carpet completely.
Chairs – Chiavari or similar replacement chairs can cost an extra $50-$100 per table, use uplighting at less than half the cost.
Dark Room – Sometimes venues are just dark. Lighting brightens up the space and makes it feel more warm and elegant.
Linens – Upgraded linens can cost $30-$120 per table, use uplighting to impart color and shimmer to standard white or cream colored linens.
Low Ceilings – Smaller ballrooms feel more like dungeons than ballrooms. Use uplighting’s vertical lines to make the room feel bigger and taller. Use a blisslight on the ceiling to make it feel more expansive and taller. Pin-spot centerpieces to make it feel more dimensional.
Ugly Art Filled Walls – Use light to control what people see. Cake spotlights, pin-spotlights, table spotlights can all redirect what people see and what they don’t see.
Terrible Lighting – Fluorescent lights are ugly. They make people look ugly, they make the venue look ugly, and otherwise are terrible light sources. Bringing in lighting will let you fix the bad lighting in a space.
Wall Color – Uplights can change the colors of any wall in an event space at the touch of a button.
W Hotel uplighting, pin-spots and cake spotlight at a wedding in Washington, DC.
Lighting can make a big huge difference in the look of your event space and is one of the most cost effective ways to transform the room. After all, no one can see your other decor elements if they are in the dark.
Transform Your Event
Whether your budget is $50, $500, or $5,000 we can help you find a cost effective way to light up your event and save money in the process. Check out all the diy lighting rentals we offer and what you can do to transform your event.
We’d love to hear what you think, leave your feedback, questions, or comments below.
Cake spotlight, texture lighting and uplighting at Whitehall Manor for a Virginia Tech inspired wedding.
Lighting is the difference between your wedding being forgotten or your wedding being unforgettable. We make it easy and affordable for anyone to create an unforgettable wedding.
This wedding features Monica and Ray, a couple who met and had a love for Virginia Tech. Their cake featured two Hokie Birds dressed up for the wedding as a cake topper and a beautifully elegant tree and maroon and orange leaf motif climbing the tiers of the cake. Without a cake spotlight the cake would have been in the dark, the Hokie birds would have been missed, and the elegant design would have been forgotten. Smartly they had a cake spotlight on the cake to illuminate the details that they had put so much thought into.
A scroll texture pattern light was used in conjunction with the organic elements that they used throughout the rest of the wedding decor. Amber was an elegant choice that matched the existing lighting temperature of the fixtures in the space and warmed up the beautiful ?historic features of the venue. Wireless uplights are a perfect match for historic venues like Whitehall where power isn’t necessarily where you want to place lights.
Together the elements worked together to create the perfect inspired elegant and romantic atmosphere that highlighted the important details in their decor for their wedding making it unforgettable. Go Hokies!
Two color gobo template with circles that inspired the design.
We are expecting our first child and there is a lot of pressure that comes with that! The most pressure (so far) came from announcing our child to the world…
People expect designers to be creative, they expect us to do things that other people wouldn’t spend 5 seconds on, and they expect it to be amazing. In other words, pressure.
Any designer can tell you, it’s easy being creative for other people but being creative for yourself and for your future progeny is a whole different ball game.
The Concept
My wife Kari is the real designer in the family. She was on Etsy and was inspired by a great example of our last name “King” with a crown in the design on the front of a onesie. Going with the regal theme and the play on our last name she wanted it to say “Heir Apparent” somewhere and the expected date of our progeny.
It made it easier to think of Kari as the client and then coming up with ideas around her vision.
Making It
I knew that the design would require taking over our living room. We ordered the onesie and on the day it arrived Kari had to go to a work function and I thought it would be the perfect time to create the announcement and take over the house. ?I knew that I wanted a soft pink and blue in the background and I wanted to the shirt to really pop out of the background. I made the pink and blue gobo design so I could get the pink and blue aspect of the design to pop out of the background when projected with a gobo light.
I knew that the white onesie would have to be in focus while the background would need to be blurred. I used some twine and two lighting stands to hang the shirt from so I could get enough distance between the shirt and the background to get the blur effect right. I also knew I needed a ton of light specifically on the shirt so I could get a really high contrast look so I ended up using three of our cake spotlight rental lights.
I needed a wall to project on and a flat boring wall wasn’t interesting enough. I ended up using the curtains for our windows on the front of our house to project onto. The light did a really great job covering up the gray and white scroll pattern on the window treatment while adding some texture and interest in behind the colored circles of light.
I used a prime 50mm lens shot at f/1.8 so I could get a blurred background while keeping the shirt in focus.
The final birth announcement that we created.
The Final Result
As with most creative endeavors the devil’s in the details. I added some detail to the clothes pins holding the onesie to make them blue and pink, added a crown to the label on the shirt, enhanced the contrast and some colors as well as adding the text.
It helps having an entire inventory of lighting at my disposal, but thinking creatively with light can enable a number of design ideas and projects that would be otherwise impossible to do. Texture lighting like the gobo lights are infinitely versatile and we can help you come up with a way to use lighting creatively for your projects.
I think it came out pretty well and most importantly checked off the hardest part of having a child (so far). What do you think? Ideas, thoughts, comment below.
Gobos are a great way to create a starry sky type of an effect at an event. We have a number of star pattern templates including large stars, stars with moons, small stars, or pin-points of stars.
Moving Stars
All of our gobo lights have a slow rotation feature that will allow the stars to slowly move at the touch of a button. This can be a great feature to create a more dynamic star effect.
You can create a more 3-D larger effect by using a prism lens on the light. The prism lens triples the number of stars that are projected by the light and are perfect for filling a ceiling with a blanket of stars. When using a prism and the rotation feature together you get a really dynamic, large coverage type of an effect.
Pricing
These lights work best in pairs so we have special pricing worked out for our stock star templates. Pricing for starry sky gobo texture lights are located on our rental lighting price page.
Gobos are the best at projecting clearly defined stars. When you want to project more pin-points of light that slowly move you might want to rent a Blisslight. Blisslights create a more slowly moving blanket of thousands of tiny laser generated stars wherever you aim the light.
Wireless uplights lighting up the columns on historic manor house Whitehall Manor.
Whitehall Manor in Bluemont Virginia is an idyllic venue to get married. Nestled in the foothills of the blue ridge mountains Whitehall is close enough to DC and nearby airports to make it accessible but far enough away from the hustle of DC to escape and relax.
Historic manor houses are the perfect candidate for enhancing with lighting. Lighting helps illuminate and feature the beauty inherent in the space. Neutral tones help enhance the historic feel and make it feel more warm and intimate.
Texture lighting combined with wireless uplighting gives a balanced look.
We lit the columns on the outside of Whitehall. The wireless uplights make it easy to move lighting from space to space so you can save money by using less lights and move them as your guests move from space to space. The lights have no problem reaching all the way up the 20ft+ columns.
Neutral tones like amber are great for warming up a reception space and making it feel more intimate, elegant and romantic.
We also utilized texture lighting inside in combination with the wireless uplights to create detail and framed the texture lights into the spaces of the venue making it feel organic.