Latest Watershapes magazine article

Latest Watershapes magazine article

By Michael Gambino

I have been writing for Watershapes magazine for about three years now. Previously I had been writing feature articles for their sister Landshapes magazine which discontinued publication. Shortly after Landshapes’ demise, Editor of Watershapes, Eric Herman, asked me to continue my landscape lighting articles in Watershapes and I agreed.

Watershapes is an industry magazine for designers and builders of pools and water features. I have written for many trade magazines (see Gambino articles on this site) more closer related towards my industry like landscaping and architectural. However Watershapes has been my personal favorite because they do not edit my articles without my permission. They also do not add their own content to my articles without my consent or place photos within the article that promote products or ideologies of their paid advertisers like other publications have done in the past.

When they asked me to write an article about LED’s,

https://gambinolighting.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Light-Emitting-Deficiencies.pdf

I had to advise them that I would only do so under the condition that it was 100% genuine representation of my experiences and my honest opinion free of any false hype that I’ve read in other publications by biased sources who have financial gain due to their promotion. They didn’t hesitate and assured me that’s all they wanted was my opinion and experience good bad or indifferent whether it rubbed some of their advertisers the wrong way or not.

True to their word the article does appear as I wrote it. I had anticipated a number of nasty e-mails from those who have a great investment in LED’s and are really promoting and pushing hard for their acceptance and use in the marketplace.

Much to my surprise I have yet to receive even one nasty response. In fact I have received just the opposite most all have been supportive. The ones that didn’t offer an opinion were from product suppliers trying to bet me to try their product. Even those e-mails were respectful.

Interesting side note about LED’s. Keeping an open mind about them, my wife and I purchased Christmas light LED string lights for our tree this year. On the box they are advertised as warm white LED’s. Last night I went to install them. We turned them on and my wife immediately noticed that there was a definately irregularity between the light color and brightness of the emitters or LED diodes. It was in such a random and irregular pattern that it made no sense and looked real bad. It appears that cool color and warm color diodes were mixed on the same string. Perhaps just an isolated defective. Unfortunately not. we opened everyone of the 8 other boxes and they were all the same. This product was from a respected name brand manufacturer not an off brand discount product. At 3 times the cost of traditional incandescent mini lights needless to say we will return them. We found ourselves in the hardware store at 8 PM on a Saturday night searching around for replacements late in the Christmas season to find slim pickings. Luckily we were able to get 12 boxes of brand name (same brand as LED’s) incandescent mini lights for our tree.

We got home and I hung the lights so my wife could complete the hanging of the ornaments today. So what do 120V Christmas lights have to do with 12V landscape lights. Probably not much but I did find it disappointing as I was looking forward to trying those LED Christmas lights. Maybe next year.

UPDATE: Five weeks after the article appeared I received this note from the editor of Watershapes magazine coming after someone requested permission to reprint the article in a landscape industry newsletter-

“A number of people have commented to me regarding your article and all but one, and you know who that is, have been extremely positive. One guy told me that he admired you for saying what a lot of people have been thinking but haven’t had the nerve to speak up. Very well done, my friend.”

I know who the person is who complained and it doesn’t surprise me as this is not the first time they have had a difference of opinion over something I wrote for a publication.

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