I’d like to stop and take a moment to talk about lights. Not photography related lights – automotive. I’ve always had a pretty strong interest for high performance lighting but I fear I took an interest a little far the past few months.

I started out with my headlights

Morimoto Mini H1 projectors, 35w ballasts, 5000k bulbs, and mini gatling gun shrouds. All well and good..

Mixed in 6 KC Daylighter replica lights with 35w 7000k bulbs..

And then I decided to take a few steps back as the overall end product wasn’t exactly what I wanted – that and my truck needed the work and I needed the money to fix it, so on the next agenda is going to either be halogen projectors with clear lenses and HIDS, or – a bi-xenon aux light idea I have floating around in my head as well as some low mounted fog lights – 3000k fogs..

One of the main reasons I’m so interested in this at this point in time is I got a job a month or two ago where I wake up at 5:30 in the morning and drive in total darkness, in the middle of no where, in deer/wolf/bear country and find the ability to see important. Now the focus is on “off road” lighting with a mix of on road performance. What I have planned will be safe to use on the road in the situation of “in an emergency” (Funny story that… After doing my original retrofit I was using cheap ballasts that kicked out as I was driving to work. No street lights, lots of corners, and I nearly ditched my truck.) So if that should EVER happen again I’d have a backup high/low beam projected HID setup that wouldn’t be a danger on the road to other drivers.

6 forward facing HID’s would be a little excessive on a day by day basis, but with fog lights for foreground (my truck is higher than stock and I have a lack of light directly in front – makes night time off road navigating sketchy) combined with my headlights would be a great daily driving combination that looks cool – but also serves a purpose for making it easier to see me, and easier for me to see everything around. The problem I have with my projectors is yes they’re bright, but I’d like it to be brighter – especially off road where slow speeds make the glare easy to live with – compared to driving with lots of lights where the glare (that I see, not that I cause) can be dangerous as your eyes don’t like adjusting to the lower light output of headlights after all the offroad lights are turned off.

So there you have it, the past, present, and future plan for my other interest that’s almost as fun as photography.