Snow-covered landscape art is a combination of snow/ice building and lighting art. Many lighting technologies were used as light sources of snow-covered landscape lighting applications, such like candlelight, incandescent lights and fluorescent lights. In spite of the increasingly mature of the sculpture and architectural art, those traditional light sources have seriously hindered the further development of snow-covered landscape lighting.
Under such circumstances, LED light source has many advantages, gradually becoming a developing trend in this field. Compared with traditional light sources, LED has many incomparable advantages: energy-saving, long service life, high reliability, environmental friendly, color changeable and dimmable. LED lighting is an emerging industry, especially in the field of snow/ice landscaping area. LED snow-covered landscape lighting applications face up great challenges. Special LED features must be fully understood by designers before creating beautiful snow-covered landscape buildings/sculptures with LED snow-covered landscape lighting applications. From the point of view of landscape designs, the projecting effect, brightness of LED lamps within ice sculptures and special presenting effects that lighting control system can realize become the most concerned issue. Designers need to take fully consideration of these issues, then take assessment to design plans through final lighting effects and model constructions.
LED snow-covered landscape lighting applications can be divided into two types: cast lighting mode and transparent lighting mode. Cast lighting mode can send light to the surface of buildings and sculptures, presenting the building facades and appearances mainly via surface reflection. Gradually, designers hope to create a type of ice sculptures can automatically emit light by themselves (invisible LED Street Light source), which is hardly achieved by traditional light sources. LED lighting technology provides possibility to ice building/sculpture amateurs. Designers take full use of the light emitting characteristics of LEDs, embedded them inside the ice buildings/sculptures. In this way, the optical normal axis of embedded LED light is perpendicular to the viewing direction. Thus LED lamps cannot be observed by viewers. They only can see the illuminated reflecting surface of ice sculptures. These embedded LED snow-covered landscape lighting applications have perfect presenting effects on the surface of ice bodies. Nowadays, LED lighting technology has already widely used in this area. These lamps need to have a large light radiated power. High-powered LED lighting devices will be more likely used in these snow-covered landscape lighting applications.