What a good boyfriend/son your are.
Very nice work.
Ultra bright LED's are great. The reason is, you can get the same brightness out of them for half the current. (so to speak)
I bought some PLCC-2 LED's to use on some PCB's. They were high brightness, but as i was only using them as indicator LED's, I put large value resistors on them and they run below 1mA at perfect brightness.
Like vne147 suggested, increase the value of the resistors and you will get lower brightness.
You may even be able to run you frames off batteries for long periods if the current consumption is low.
But nice work (Y)