This is a story about light.

For the past year, something just hasn't been right in the living room. The problem was there just wasn't enough light in the evening. We had several lamps, but even with all of them turned on, things were still pretty dim.

Luckily, two weekends ago we travelled to IKEA, and while we were there Angela had an idea. She found some lamps that came in three different sizes, and realized that it was just what we were missing in the living room. So, we picked them up, brought them home, and then left them on the dining room table for a week while I was in Pennsylvania.

Then, this past Saturday, we found some light bulbs and put the lamps together to try them out. Things were almost perfect, until we realized that it was going to be too much of a pain to turn them on individually. Luckily, I remembered seeing a neat gizmo at Home Depot one time. In a fit of consumerism, we zipped out and got there one minute before they closed, and that was just enough time to find and purchase the magical gizmo that would solve our problem.

What is this gizmo, you ask? Well, it doesn't seem to exist on the internet, so I will have to describe it. It is made in China by Atron Electro Industries Inc (P.O Box 363 Stn. M Toronto, ON M6P 3J8), and it is a wireless remote wall switch (UPC 0 66288 41069 6). It comes with two parts: The first part is a little box that plugs into the wall and has an outlet that you can plug a lamp into (up to 240 Watts). The second part is a switch that looks very similar to a standard wall switch. All you do is attach the switch to the wall, and it uses RF to communicate with the little box. There are three RF channels available, "A", "B", and "C" (I have a "B" switch), so you can have multiple switches per lamp, or up to three different "circuits" in your house.

So, this is a photo of our new living room lighting setup. The three lamps on top of the bookshelf are the spiffy units we got at IKEA. The wall switch just to the left of the door is actually a remote RF switch which controls the little while box visible in the lower left corner of the photo. If the lamps prove too bright for some reason, we also have our other lamps (one of which is visible beside the door) to fall back on to provide different kinds of mood lighting. Also visible on the right side of this photo is one of Kenji's lightboxes.

Technical details: This photo was taken with my Rebel XT + EF-S 10-22mm at 10mm, ISO 100, f/8, for 1/30th of a second. I used my Speedlite 430EX with -2 flash exposure compensation. For this photo, I manually focused because the autofocus wasn't working right in the dark. I used the built in wide panel on the flash, but I pointed the flash straight up and put my hand in front of it to make sure none of the light from the flash hit the part of the ceiling that was in the photo. It took me a couple of tries to get it right, but I finally got the balance of light that I was looking for.