Sept 7, 2008—If your club or facility is planning a new dog sports arena or sprucing up an existing space, this series of articles can help you. Before you read this one, I suggest that you start with Article 1 on walls and windows.

3. Clutter

Myth: As long as your facility is safe and reasonably clean, it doesn’t much matter how it looks.

Reality: People are definitely affected by things like clutter along the walls. If you can avoid stacking extra equipment there, and if you can avoid such things as orange plastic safety fencing, then photos will have a more pleasing background. You may also help lower the stress level for all participants. And you may make the facility safer.

Suggestions: If you can’t wall off the equipment storage area, a possible solution is a hospital-style curtain to shield it. And, by the way, plastic snow fencing does come in other colors. The dark green type would be more attractive than orange.

Cost: There is a cost for hanging a curtain, but there’s little or no extra cost in choosing green fencing over orange.

4. Lighting

Myth: The type of lighting doesn’t matter, as long as there’s enough of it.

Reality: When it comes to photography, all lighting is definitely not created equal. Here are two prime examples:

First is fluorescent lighting. Did you know that fluorescent bulbs come in a wide variety of colors? If you buy the least expensive ones, you’re likely to have one fixture that gives a yellow cast, one that’s pink, one that’s blue, and one that’s green. You may not notice the difference across the ring, but the camera will.

Second is mercury vapor lighting. For this type of light, there’s a huge difference between one-phase and three-phase electricity. With one-phase, the fixtures actually flicker on and off 60 times per second. Each cycle causes the light color to change as the bulb heats and cools. This can make a scene look pink in one exposure and green in the next, even if the shots are taken a fraction of a second apart. Even worse, the camera may catch the light as it’s changing color, so the scene may be green at the top and pink at the bottom.

A competent photographer can color-correct for some of these effects, but at best, that may mean just standardizing the color of the dog in each shot. It may be impossible (or take an impractical amount of time) to color-correct every aspect of the scene.

Suggestions: For fluorescent lights, the solution is to use bulbs that are classified as “full-spectrum daylight.” They give the most consistent and best color results from fluorescent lighting. They also more closely match natural window light. And full-spectrum daylights are more comfortable for participants over a long day of trialing. Full-spectrum daylight bulbs are used in offices to prevent the “winter blues” because they mimic sunlight and therefore provide emotional support.

For mercury vapor lights, the best solution overall is three-phase electric service. This approach smoothes out the flickering and makes the light both constant and a consistent color. Talk to an electrician to find out what would be involved in going to three-phase. From our reading, it appears that there could be a substantial cost savings over the life of a facility from choosing three-phase. For one thing, three-phase will make heating equipment and fans last longer and run more efficiently. For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-vapor_lamp.

If you are building a facility or rewiring an old one, you can get three-phase service from your power utility. If you want to add three-phase to an existing facility, be sure to use the new digital converters. They provide a smoother quality of three-phase than the older converters, and they last longer. If you know what an uninterrupted power supply (UPS) is for a computer, the digital electricity converters are similar in effect. They prevent power fluctuations as well as lighting flickers and color changes in the way that a UPS keeps power spikes and brownouts from reaching a computer.

A note about the flickering from one-phase electricity: Most people aren’t aware of it, but there is evidence that some dogs are. (Many dogs don’t respond to TV because it has a screen-refresh rate that makes the picture seem like nonsense to them.) If you’ve ever used a cathode ray tube—CRT—computer monitor, you may have found yourself getting headaches. That’s because CRTs flicker, and different ones flicker at different rates. (Newer liquid crystal display—LCD—monitors don’t flicker.) It’s possible that dogs feel the effects of flickering lights in the same way.

As for sodium vapor lights, from the standpoint of photography, please don’t choose sodium vapor (also called low-pressure sodium and sodium oxide lights). The light from these fixtures is extremely orange. It is almost entirely missing the blue and green wavelengths of the spectrum. With sodium vapor lighting, true and accurate color is difficult, if not impossible. You can see this for yourself if you ever watch a trial under sodium vapor lights (and from the examples below). Even with all the advantages that our eyes and brains supply in interpreting what we see, it’s nearly impossible to tell a black lab from a chocolate lab under the orange of sodium vapor lights. Other colors are just as compromised. For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_vapor_lamp.

Of course before your organization goes to the expense of rewiring, getting new electric service, or changing fixtures, it’s a good idea to consult with a qualified lighting specialist.

Finally, a note about the quantity of light: We recommend lighting that provides consistent brightness across the ring. If the fixtures are too far apart, the ring will have light and dark spots—also a real problem for photography, and for competitors.

Cost: All of these solutions have a cost. Installing three-phase service may cost a few thousand dollars, but it may also be more than offset in savings over the life of the facility or club. Full-spectrum daylight fluorescents are more expensive than the regular ones, but they have health as well as photography benefits.

5. Flooring

Myth: The only place that the floor surface really matters is in the ring.

Reality: Safer is better. While there are pros and cons for each type, the three indoor ring surfaces we see most often are continuous rubber matting (or rubber mat tiles), artificial turf, and dirt. I’m not qualified to argue the merits of each type, but here are some simple observations: I’ve seen people and dogs trip on rubber because it’s so sticky and the surface can be very hard if someone falls. And I’ve seen them slip on turf because it’s so slick. Dirt raises other challenges (for one, it’s dirty!), such as an overload of tempting smells for the dogs. Dirt, sand, or clay also results in a lot of inhaled dirt for people and dogs.

Suggestions: What we suggest is that you provide something other than concrete for the surfaces near the ring, especially where people and dogs may stand for long times. Concrete is cold and stressful for feet, legs, and backs.

Here’s one more suggestion about flooring: If you do have any choice of color—for example, if rubber flooring is available in a choice of colors—go for a middle-tone color, such as gray rather than black. Even dark green or brown is better than black for photographic purposes.

Cost: Extending ergonomic flooring to the walkway around the ring carries a cost, but it also adds a lot of comfort and potentially safety benefits. Choosing a different floor color may not cost anything extra.

As the first two images show, a dramatic shift between red and normal color takes place 60 times a second with single-phase lighting. At the other end of the cycle, the image is decidedly green (not shown above). Virgil can correct the red or green image to make the dog look approximately the right color, but the floor and other elements may remain red or green. Fixing all those parts would be expensive and time-consuming.

Even worse, an image under single-phase can be half red and half green, if it’s illuminated by two lights at different parts of the cycle, or if the segment of the cycle captured by the camera contains the switch from green to red. That can be unfixable.

The next three images show the havoc that results from a mixture of lighting types and sodium vapor in particular. In the images that are monochromatic (mainly orange), there’s no cost-effective way to add in the missing blue and green. They simply aren’t there in the cast light.

The final picture shows how good a photo looks under three-phase lighting. The light is a constant color, and it renders natural looking results.

This ends the second article in the dog arena series. Click here to continue with the third (final) article in the series.

If you have any questions about cameras, software, or photography, Virgil would be glad to hear from you. You can email him, you can call (513) 779-8934, or you can stop by at an event and ask questions.