[notmytarga]

The camera exposure is not doing the effect justice, needs more time on a tripod for the reach of the lights to show.

My preference for tree canopy uplighting is to visualize the smaller branches and leaves illuminated giving a nice visual effect and soft reflected light of the area. Hitting the truck directly creates a bright spot, which is exaggerated in the picture, but that is essentially what the eye sees and the brain changes to make it tolerable. Pleasing light requires less brain "squinting" / filtering.

Light intensity decreases at the inverse of the distance - squared. That means that at 2 ft it will be 1/4th as bright, 3 ft 1/9th as bright. Even illumination from a single source requires the distances to be even.

In order to evenly illuminate a tree the source needs to be off the tree (from the ground, another tree) if you want the trunk fully lit. The other solution is to mount the lights on the BACK of the trunk, illuminating the canopy evenly from there with the bright trunk away from you. Coning the light beam with louvers is another trick.