Through the use of proper lighting equipment, religious organizations can apply the same fundamental lighting principles employed by photographers and cinematographers the world over to enhance the visual impact of their religious services. The right church lighting can help eliminate distractions and direct your audience’s attention. More importantly, it can also help create a sense of atmosphere and elicit emotive responses from your congregation. This is especially useful for religious institutions that have begun recording and live streaming their services this past year.
While your house of worship may already have existing lighting equipment in place, they were most likely implemented to keep the space lit while a physical audience is in attendance. Lighting that may grab the attention of those in attendance may not necessarily have the same visual impact when viewed virtually and remotely. Most cameras on the market also don’t have the same dynamic range that our eyes have, so you may need to utilize more powerful lighting than you think. These are important considerations to keep in mind when investing in upgrades to your church’s lighting.
Lighting for Houses of Worship: LEDs & Alternatives
When it comes to new lighting equipment, LEDs are the future. Not only do LED fixtures last significantly longer compared to traditional incandescent and fluorescent lighting, but they are much more power efficient as well. Unlike traditional “hot” lights, most LED lighting barely generates any heat (if at all) during operation and can be passively cooled. The absence of active cooling fans equals practically silent operation. This makes LED lighting the ideal, non-disruptive solution for video recording and live streaming.
There are LED alternatives to just about every type of church lighting fixture you’ll need to upgrade your religious organization’s existing setup. The size of your house of worship will determine the output strength of the LED fixtures needed. Some fixtures are stationary while others have motorized heads built in, and most have DMX connectors built in allowing them to be remotely operated. RGBW (Red, Green, Blue, White) LED lighting even has the ability to change its color output without the need to constantly change between different lighting gels and filters.
Ellipsoidal Reflector Spot (ERS) style LED fixtures such as the Chauvet Ovation E-160WW LED Ellipsoidal Light are ideal for illuminating pulpits or highlighting other stationary areas within a house of worship. Its power output is comparable to that of a 575W tungsten source while drawing less than 100W of power. This adds up to significant power savings throughout its estimated 50,000 hours run time.
The Chauvet Ovation E-160WW outputs a flat, even field of light, and can be adapted with various lens tubes (such as the Chauvet 19deg. Ovation Ellipsoidal HD Lens Tube) to adjust the light’s throw distance. It also supports both 16-bit and 8-bit dimming curves, allowing for precise power output adjustments.
Lighting for Engaging Visuals
In addition to spotlighting key areas of your house of worship’s stage, illuminating the background with “wash lighting” such as the Chauvet COLORado 1 Solo RGBW LED Wash Light can add a sense of dimensionality to the entire scene. Wash lighting is designed to fill a large area with light and can be especially helpful in making live streamed services more visually engaging by allowing remote audiences to see everything that’s happening throughout the house of worship. The RGBW LED in the Chauvet COLORado 1 Solo allows you to remotely adjust the light’s color output on the fly without needing to rely on color gels. This is a versatile feature that makes seamless color changes possible and can be helpful in setting the mood as you progress through different portions of your service.
To truly take your institution’s lighting setup to the next level, consider investing in motorized LED fixtures like the CHAUVET DJ Intimidator Spot 360 and CHAUVET DJ Rogue R1X. [GR1]
CHAUVET DJ Intimidator Spot 360
Chauvet’s Intimidator Spot 360 is a remote controllable 100 W LED moving head light fixture. It features a pair of rotating prisms that can split the beam and cover a larger area, along with a motorized focus that allows you to project sharp gobo patterns from just about any distance.
CHAUVET DJ Rogue R1X
The Rogue R1X Wash is a full featured, zoomable RGBW LED yoke wash fixture powered by seven 25 W RGBW LEDs. It features an incredible 7.9 to 62.7 degree zoom range, fast and smooth pan and tilt movements, and supports simple and complex DMX channel profiles as well as 3- and 5-pin DMX input and output.
Also consider the ProLights STARK400 LED Moving Wash, ProLights PIXIEWASH LED Moving Wash, or Electronic Theatre Controls ETC Selador Desire D60 Wash Luminaire — all great options for illuminating your worship space.
Lighting Controllers for Maximum Functionality
Be sure to also invest in appropriate church lighting controllers in order to take full advantage of all of your new LED fixtures. For stationary LED fixtures, a controller like the Chauvet Obey 40 DMX Controller should be more than up to the task. It’ll give you simultaneous control of up to a dozen fixtures at 16 channels each. Motorized RGBW LED fixtures are much more advanced by comparison. You will need a much more robust control console like the Chauvet ChamSys QuickQ 10 1-Universe Compact Lighting Console to fully take advantage of their functionality. Thankfully, the ChamSys QuickQ 10 features an intuitive interface and gesture support like pinching to zoom and scrolling (modeled after modern smartphones), allowing for simple control of all fixture attributes. It even has built-in support for the QuickQ Remote Control app, allowing you to control the console remotely via your smartphone.
Expand your church lighting capabilities and find the best solutions for your team by visiting Adorama Business Solutions.
