Picture Perfect

Andrei Duman has spent years on the road, capturing stunning images from some of the world’s most exotic environments; he’s documented the Moai Statutes of Easter Island, the Aurora Borealis from Greenland, Namibia’s San Bushmen and more. The accomplished aerial, travel and nature photographer designed and opened a new and one-of-a-kind gallery in the high end Westfield Topanga shopping center in Los Angeles. For Duman, lighting for the space and his work was a critical consideration – colors had to be rendered exactly and illumination had to be finitely controlled.

Light is a critical element in capturing images – and it’s critical to the accurate display of color in art photography. Human and his lighting designer insisted upon SORAA LEDs to illuminate his intimate 1,500 sq. ft. gallery and the “display trees,” from which 12 double-sided images in glass frames hang and appear to float in the air.

The gallery’s lighting makes colors in the image pop and is flexible so that illumination can be narrowly cast and controlled to the exact spot to a pinpoint on an image. SORAA LED lights also create a mood that enhances the customer experience, allowing them to connect to the image. That’s because SORAA’s unique GaN on GaN TM technology allows its LEDs to operate at currents that are more than five times higher than LEDs built on other materials. This means a lot of light comes from a very small source, resulting in a narrow beam that can be controlled to crisply illuminate any area with a single shadow.

Duman’s images are illuminated for perfect rendering of colors and whiteness because of SORAA’s Violet-Emission 3-Phosphor (VP₃) LED technology. Utilizing every color in the rainbow, especially deep red emission, SORAA’s lamps render warm tones beautifully and accurately, and achieve a color-rendering index (CRI) of 95 and deep red (R9) rendering of 95. And unlike blue-based white LEDs without any violet emission, the company’s lamps have violet emissions to properly excite fluorescing brightening agents, including paper and natural objects like human eyes and teeth.