# Black and color lighting



## Temeculabob (Aug 28, 2013)

Does anybody have experience with using colored lights in a graveyard, and then overlighting features with black lights to enhance the scene? I want to use both types of lights, but I don't want either one to diminish the effect of the other.


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## corey872 (Jan 10, 2010)

There are dozens if not hundreds of threads on here about lighting graveyards, so the search is your friend in that regard.

As far as black and colored light and normal light - you can certainly use both at the same time, though the main feature of black lighting is it's ability to make fluorescent paints glow and/or supercharge glow-in-the-dark items. ... and it does this with very minimal ambient light which means the paint or GITD items seem to be emitting the light themselves. When you throw a bunch of ambient light in, the effect of the blacklight is diminished to some extent.

If I had to do it, I would use the normal lights very sparingly - and leave plenty of 'holes' or dark spots - then have the blacklight play into those dark spots. Really, you would want to treat blacklight just like any other color. For example if you put red, green and blue lights face-on to an item, they will combine to make white and you might as well just light the scene with a white lightbulb. But if you shine blue light in from the left and red light in from the right, the object will take on a weird 3-D appearance and make a really neat scene.


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## Acid PopTart (Oct 29, 2007)

Corey872 is absolutely right in all regards. I've worked with black lights and the chromadepth theory (with glasses) for the past few years.(http://www.hauntforum.com/album.php?albumid=989) There's a reason you have to test what reacts to black lights in the dark, other light will wash it out and diminish the effect whether it's a coloured light or not. Or so has been my experience. Not saying you cannot use both, I have with great success, I would recommend exactly what Corey872 suggested, you'll need pockets of darkness to allow the black lights to have optimum effect. Last year I had a few props not really black light reactive, so I lit them with very tiny battery operated spots so that each scene or prop really had their own lighting.

Now I did have a mermaid egg display for my freakshow last year, I used the American DJ H2O light with a water effect from about a 6 foot distance on the huge clam shell that had the eggs inside. The eggs were black light reactive and I used 2 tiny pen black lights (about 1 inch) on each side of the dish of "eggs" that the kids could squish their hands in. It was a very small thing to light with the black lights and I had them angled directly above the dish and the ambient light from the water effects light was far away enough that it did not diminish the effect.

It will take experimentation but I bet you'll come up with something that really suits what you want.


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