Featuring six outdoor fiber optic displays and two indoors, the project is a wonder of composition, color, art and work and planning beyond imagination. In the Forest of Light, 20,000 -- !!!-- stems of light welcome visitors to a dense forest of changing colors.
While the lights change color, there is no movement to speak of, aside from wind forcing them to wave a bit. There are benches available throughout the gardens, so don't bother taking along a lawn chair. The trail is about mile long through all the exhibits, but the displays are spread throughout the gardens.
We visited on Friday night, and there were lines were long, but weekends, of course, are jammed. Timed passes must be purchased online prior to a visit. Tripods are only allowed but with certain restrictions. From the website-- purchase your admission ticket upon arrival and proceed to the Information Desk in the Visitor Center where you will fill out a permission form and receive a tripod or easel tag.
Shooting the displays without a tripod can be done, but only with extreme difficulty. And I can't imagine why anyone would want to. These photos are all raw, that is, not Photoshopped at all and the color is all here, but it took exposures of up to 20 seconds, and pushed to the hilt. The best time to shoot is probably about dusk, when there is enough daylight to show detail without drowning out the fiber optic lights.
The Water Towers or the Meadow at Hourglass Lake is impressive, even if only thinking of the numbers. It includes 17,388 one-liter recyclable bottles filled with water and optic fiber, and colors change inside the bottles. More than 42 MILES of optic cable is used in the project, in which the bottles are stacked in layers between laser cut wood sheets.
Twenty three speakers are hidden inside the 'sculptures'.
