A nighttime landscape illuminated by starlight or the glow of the moon is a common trope. You might even call it cliché. Benoit Paillé riffs on this tired motif by adding a square of LEDs, a simple move that creates something new and eerie.

Paille spent five years hauling his lights into the wilds of Canada for his ongoing project Alternative Landscapes I and II. The idea came to him while gazing at the holiday lights blanketing his hometown of Trois-Rivières. He wondered what it might be like to hang lights in unusual locations. "I started shooting this light installation in the nearby forest," Paillé says, "and I realized that I would use this method to investigate the notion of landscape."

He ultimately settled on a DIY rig using LEDs on a three-foot-by-three-foot square of corrugated board. Paillé strings it up with fishing line or affixes it to a tripod, which he removes in post-production. He works mostly on moonless, windless nights when all is still, and uses exposures of up to four minutes, giving the scene a strange, luminous effect.

Paillé's spent the past three years in a camper, traveling the country following good weather. Everywhere he goes, the light box goes along, from Kennedy Lake on Vancouver Island to La Mauricie National Park in Quebec. Whether capturing an empty dock or a snowy wood, there's an element of the ordinary that appeals to him. "I’m not looking for a spectacular landscape," Paillé says. "I despise the spectacular or the grandiose in photography."

The illuminated square always floats in the center of the frame. And while you can't stop staring at it, what's most interesting is how it enhances the surrounding scene. In Alternative Landscapes, it's the manmade element amongst the natural beauty that creates magic.