Ben Díaz, head of product management at Astera, and principal at his own company, Planeta Namec SL, takes us into the world of LED color engines and color management in his session at LDI 2025, The Quest For Color Efficiency, in the LDInnovation Conference on Monday, December 8, at 4pm.*
Register for LDI 2025 at www.ldishow.com. Use promo code SPEAKER25 and save 20% on the LDInnovation Conference.
Live Design chats with Díaz about his love for lighting, his studies in film and cinematography in his native Spain – he hails from the Celtic Nation of Galicia – his world travels for work, and LED color challenges.
Live Design: Can you describe yourself in less than 50 words?
Ben Díaz: I am a lighting adept with obsessive love for storytelling, research and design thinking processes, who have been lucky enough to enjoy a long career as a lighting designer and cinematographer first, and now as head of product management at Astera, while leading my editorial and educational company Planeta Namec SL.
LD: Please give a brief overview of your training/education/career path.
BD: I studied film and performance production, and later lighting and cinematography; both vocational degrees in Spain. I completed a sort of Postgraduate Degree in Hollywood with my uncle and director of photography Ray Rivas for three months, and from then on, it was all work experience, self-study, and many technical specialization courses. During the COVID pandemic, I decided to initiate a Bachelor's Degree in Product, UX, and UI Design, which I completed with honors in Barcelona, but I have extended it for another year. The truth is, I don't see myself stopping remote studies in the future. It helps me retrain, gain different perspectives when specifying products, and better understand user needs.
I started teaching around 2005, while still studying filmmaking. First, I offered substitute classes at my school, and later I coordinated audio and direction of photography courses for professionals. My breakthrough as a teacher came as a professor of Film Production and Technical Media, while also developing my professional career as a camera operator and lighting engineer. Emigrating to Denmark first and then to Germany for work reasons prevented me from continuing teaching full-time, but I continued leading master classes for several universities, associations like Avixa and AAIV, and organizations like the Danish Lighting Center. In the last year and a half, especially after forming the Lighting Adepts community, I began to focus more on disseminating knowledge about LED technology.
As for my development in the lighting industry, I started working on shows in 2000, and from 2007 onwards I devoted a lot of time to operating consoles and designing stage lighting for touring artists, especially in Spain, Portugal, France, and Latin America. I was fortunate enough to be able to combine this with my own audiovisual content production company, signing on as the cinematographer for many music videos, documentaries, and fiction. Thanks to these productions and workflows, I was also able to delve into video editing and color correction in post-production. In 2014, I met Peter Johansen, then CEO of SGM Light, and embarked on developing business for the brand in Latin America, Spain, and Portugal. In 2017, I accepted the position of head of product management in Aarhus, and from there I was able to launch the first IP66 moving heads on the market, as well as iconic luminaires such as the Q-8. In 2022, I started working in Munich for ARRI with the main objective of specifying and developing the SkyPanel X, which was launched in September 2023 and received considerable recognition as well as two awards at IBC and CineCongress. Finally, in early 2023, I decided to continue my career as head of product management at Astera, where I am truly happy after the launches of LunaBulb, SolaBulb, QuikSpot, and QuikPunch, which have earned 12 international awards, including Best Debuting Lighting Product at LDI.
LD: Please describe your most recent project.
BD: My most personal project is the launch of my latest book, “Design, Lighting and Contrast,” a method for constructing stage lighting. I am now in the second edition in Spanish and the English edition will be out soon, all published by Planeta Namec under the Lighting Adepts label. The book is just an extension of the many activities that Lighting Adepts carries out, which include courses, conferences, a YouTube channel where I interview lighting designers, a co-working space in Spain, and many other activities. It is a very active community that has grown completely organically without sponsors or advertising, so I am very happy with what we have achieved.
I embarked on this project to contribute to education in the industry, and despite the amount of time it takes up and all the effort involved in balancing it with my work at Astera creating products, I have no regrets whatsoever
LD: What are you teaching at LDI and who is your target audience?
BD: First of all, I would like to say that it is a real honor for me to be at LDI as a speaker. LDI is hugely important in the industry, and I enjoy coming every year with new products.
In my session, I would like to shed some light on a topic that causes a lot of confusion in the market: color engines. I believe that in terms of engineering blocks, manufacturers have created a maze of possibilities and, in my opinion, the time has come to reach conclusions and establish standards, even if they are not official. I think we need to reflect on the role of efficiency in lighting technologies and establish which color parameters we are going to stick with, so that we can continue to move forward and reduce other key issues related to logistics, where color engines also have an impact. Obviously, if we are happy with the quality obtained with one type of light engine, it does not make much sense to continue adding wavelengths to end up with increasingly large and heavy equipment that does not necessarily provide more light for the same amount of watts.
In essence, I think it's important not to lose sight of the bigger picture. We adopted LED technology because it is the most efficient and because it eliminates inconvenient parts of our workflow. Color management in LED must be balanced with this in order to achieve sustainable long-term solutions.
Ultimately, it is up to users to decide, and manufacturers will act accordingly. But it is important that this choice is influenced more by logic and an understanding of how the technology works.
LD: What has been the biggest challenge of your career to date?
BD: I think the biggest challenge for me as a product manager has always been to design useful solutions for real problems that are sufficiently innovative but also sufficiently tailored to the market, and above all to launch necessary products at the right time. It is a complex and always challenging art, because what works with one product does not necessarily work with the next, macro market trends have a huge influence on everything, and user validation processes have to be long, carefully analyzed, and put into perspective, while products must also be designed for mass production and respond to a life cycle of, as I see it, a minimum of eight years in the case of LED lighting. It's not easy because the supply chain imposes limitations, sustainable design also imposes limitations, there are user requirements that sometimes almost violate the laws of physics, and you also have to stick to a specific budget, staff, and timeline. It's difficult, but it's also fascinating and keeps me alert and eager to learn, because otherwise it's impossible to repeat success in product launches. As if that weren't enough of a challenge, at Astera we have to bring products to market that not only meet the needs of the events world, but also those of the film and broadcast production segment.
Another thing I love is realizing that I'm wrong. It's a very tense moment, because you always want to be right and think that you've designed everything correctly from the start. But in reality, you have to have the courage to listen and realize that there are areas where you can do much better, and what's even more difficult is not only recognizing this but going to war to make it happen before you launch the product, even though everything is already very measured and turning back is almost impossible.
It requires a lot of humility, resilience, and commitment to the idea that, in a collaborative context, your opinion is just one among many and that you must always defend the right idea, even if it is radically opposed to your initial vision. In industry terms, making last-minute changes upsets many people involved in the process, but if that change is necessary for the user and will protect the product's life cycle, your responsibility as a Product Manager is to fight for it to the bitter end.
LD: What is your advice for people just getting into the industry?
BD: The best advice I can give is to give it your best shot, but don't be afraid to fail. You will fail. And you will fail in painful ways. The important thing is how much you are able to learn in the process, and how much insight you gain to improve your strategy next time. This is a profession of people, in my opinion quite intelligent people, who are able to detect the personality and potential of others. If you give your all to excel at the task you are doing and learn quickly, it is difficult not to advance in your career within the lighting industry.
Conceptualizing the profession is key. I believe that both a lighting designer and a product manager, and in general any professional, must have a passion for learning from others, contextualizing data, and understanding how systems work. I don't think it matters too much whether you have talent or not, because that's too elusive a concept to take into account. Nor do I believe that hard work is related to the number of hours you put on the stage or at the office.
What works for me is taking care of my personal life first (having healthy habits, knowing how to rest, giving my life purpose, helping those around me), and striving to be better every day in my professional life by respecting the abilities of others, which means being focused most of the time, absorbing knowledge from those who know more than you, and not giving up quickly when faced with challenges.
The Quest For Color Efficiency will be presented in a two-hour block in the LDInnovation Conference with these two sessions, and a joint Q&A at the end:
Origins of Color – Creating Impactful Immersive Experiences With Light
Register for LDI 2025 at www.ldishow.com