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A Game Of Shooting Or Seeing? If you are having a tough time seeing targets, the problem may not be with your eyes. It might be a course designer neglecting to challenge shotgunners with visible birds, not disappearing demons. By Bob Brister One evening recently, a couple of hunting buddies from out of town were seated next to me in a Houston restaurant, and I asked why I hadn’t seen them around the sporting ranges lately. They used to sponsor some big corporate shoots in their area. “Went back to golf,” the older one said almost sadly. “Sporting is more fun, but some of our best clients are in their late 50s or older, and it’s just too frustrating for them when they can’t see so many of the targets in time for a fair shot at ’em. We held our tournaments mostly in the afternoons, and some of our best customers, the older ones running companies, came after work when low sun and light sky can make orange just seem to fade out for us older folks. But when I complained to the range owner, all he did was throw the same orange targets slower and closer until they weren’t fun even for the beginners. At least now when we put on a corporate golf tournament, our guests can have a fair challenge and see what they’re trying to hit.” I asked if he thought we could really blame range owners for our “old folks” visual problems? “I damned sure can when I’m paying ’em the kind of money we spent,” he growled. “When I shoot in England, I can sure see the targets, and they aren’t gimmies, either. The Brits just throw all-black targets against the sky and orange ones against background, and their orange ones don’t have a black rim to make ’em hard to see edge-on against the trees. They’ve been throwing sporting targets since the 1920s, and maybe they’ve figured out that nowadays, it’s the mature shooters who have the time and money to support the game—and are also the ones who bring in a lot of kids and grandkids.” He had some points. Had it not been for a couple of grandfatherly geezers who many years ago loaned me guns and ammo and taught me some clay shooting tricks, I probably would never have gotten into the sport. But I played devil’s advocate and asked how beautiful black would be when an all-black teal dropped out of the sky into dark background, where it’s all but impossible to see or even score the chips? Or when wind blows black targets down below the trees? “No color target is going to be perfect for every circumstance,” he scoffed. “But black ones sure work better against the sky a lot more of the time than orange ones if they are presented right there in the air high enough and long enough to be shot. But do you realize how many orange targets thrown into the sky at hazy-day tournaments are never even fired at by older shooters who never saw ’em until they hit the ground? How fair is that?” His partner slid his chair over toward mine, wagging his finger in my face. “If somebody with your credentials would get off his semi-retirement butt long enough to write about it,” he growled in a semi-spoofing tone, “maybe the shooting industry might help us all by paying more attention to using the right color targets in the right places, particularly if you could convince ’em it would make ’em money.” So I’m writing. And from the outset, I’d like to make it clear that I’m not suggesting that throwing the right targets will make blind men see or range owners as rich as Bill Gates. But a bit of experimentation at tournaments sure wouldn’t hurt if it could make the game fairer and more enjoyable for more shooters. And it might even put some new names at the top of the leader board occasionally. All of which, of course, sounds a bit self-serving for a 73-year-old Super-Vet known for muttering curses at no-see-um targets—except that I’d keep on shooting if the targets were hot pink polka-dotted. The problem is that a lot of others won’t put up with increasing visual frustration—and a lot of others may never get into the game because of it. Complaining after tournaments or practice sessions hasn’t seemed to have achieved much so far, but maybe courteous advance suggestions from shooters who regularly patronize a range (or shooting organization) could help. I’m convinced that plenty of range operators and target setters feel it isn’t worth their time or trouble to cater to a small minority of older shooters—when the fact is that plenty of their middle-aged and younger customers are also being discouraged and/or embarrassed by poor target visibility whether or not they realize what the problem is. Yet range owners can come up with more reasons to avoid changing targets than a teenager can find for coming home late. One target setter argued that if the old, reliable orange-dome targets he’s been using for years have been satisfactory for all that time, why would they be a problem now? The answer is to remember the distances and difficulties of targets even a decade ago as compared with today’s testier presentations. Shooters nowadays would wipe out the closer, easier targets we used to shoot with the greatest of ease. So as our skills have improved, targets have become more testing (very few of us want boringly easy “lollipops”). The problem here is that testier targets tend to put more premium on their visibility—at least for the majority of shooters. I claim to know something about that because in trying to find ways around my own visual difficulties, I’ve learned a lot about the effects of poor target visibility on the scoring (and attitude toward the game) of others with less severe but basically similar problems. Many potential shooters (particularly hunters) never get into sporting because they say they just “can’t hit clays”—or that the targets are too difficult. And that’s certainly the way it can seem when shooters can’t “find” targets clearly enough or soon enough to shoot at them before they’re too far away and dropping, where they’d be difficult for anyone. The potentially good news is that my observations, here and abroad, indicate that most shooters really can see and react to the stark contrast of black targets against the sky easier than they can orange targets in the identical situation. All-orange targets (such as the increasingly-popular biodegradables) are excellent for use against most green or dark backgrounds because they have no black rim to blend in when presented edge on. White targets can in some instances be even better against some backgrounds, and chartreuse or yellow can show up best in some locales. An orange target against a light sky can be just as frustrating to some eyes as a coal-black target thrown into black shadows. Yet the vast majority of targets thrown in America, almost regardless of background, continue to be some version of orange. One argument for the orange domes with black rims is that they provide a compromise for presentations where the target starts below the horizon, then pops into the sky. Which is to a considerable extent true. But that doesn’t make ’em best for presentation over the whole course. Blaze orange can show up beautifully against dark blue sky so long as the main light source is behind the shooter. But throw that same target into the direction of the sun, and it can become difficult to see no matter what color shooting glasses are worn. A black target will usually provide contrast and acceptable visibility in either direction with any color glasses. And I’m convinced such little details are becoming more important to the game every day. Swarms of hunters show up to practice before every hunting season, but many of them—particularly the older ones who can afford hunting in this day and time—just can’t see targets very quickly to start with, often are embarrassed by their shooting, and never come back. Statistics show that it is those mature shooters, particularly those in their 50s and 60s, who nowadays are spending by far the most on guns, shells, and accessories. And the baby-boomer generation, statistically the wealthiest age group in America, next year starts hitting age 55—when many shooters seriously start noticing target visibility problems. Certainly, if every range in the country suddenly started throwing all-black targets into the sky, there would be some shooters complaining about that, too. But the advantages can be easily proven to anyone who’ll bother to look. Ever notice how easy it usually is to see the stark contrast of the black bellies of orange-dome targets when they’re presented as high incomers (and thus might as well be black because that’s all you can see)? Remember in the early days of the game when the only midis (90mm) and minis (60mm) available were ordered from England and were pitch black, and how even a tiny mini could stand out like a black dot against overcast haze? Some friends and I used to practice our walk-up hunting skills with a couple of strong-throwing Lincoln manual traps in deep ditches on opposite sides of a elevated levee, the operators protected by an overhanging bank. The shooter would walk the top of the levee, not knowing when or from which direction he’d get a pair of fast-departing targets with their orange domes showing. We quickly realized that none of us could hit as many thrown to the west (into late-afternoon, light-sky glare) as we could those thrown east (away from the light source). Then one afternoon, someone brought several cases of old, roach-defiled black targets that had been in his garage for years, and which we figured would be hard to see due to their lack of color. Turned out that those black dots stood out against the sky in both directions, most vividly against the western sky, where we’d had such difficulty seeing orange. Although the orange domes showed up beautifully moving away from the sun, particularly as they rose in bright contrast against the green background, the instant they cleared the trees into the light, they began fading so quickly, we often couldn’t see if we got a chip—a long-standing tournament problem in scoring orange targets in low light or against a light sky. So why don’t American ranges just throw more black against sky? I’ve asked that question a lot over the past year. Some target setters shrug that they set orange targets on almost every stand because that’s what the boss provides. Some range owners say they don’t want to inventory too many different target colors (actually, all they need is two). Some apparently just don’t want to bother with ordering and storing more than one color. The good news is that the idea that easier-to-see targets—not softer or closer or slower, just easier to see—has a way of making the cash register ring at least appears to be starting to get around. Phil Murray of White Flyer Targets says he’s noticed a significant increase lately in sales of its new, all-black, biodegradable Bio Sporter targets (which are actually a little cheaper than the orange ones). One range owner told me he’d tried some older-type black targets and found they wanted to stick together or warp in heat but that the new black bios didn’t, and he’s had good comments from shooters since he began using them. Also, black target chips on the ground are less of an eyesore than orange chips, which can create visual confusion when a low target momentarily crosses an area littered with blending orange target shards. I’m told that Remington has developed a new target color that’s a little more yellowish than ordinary blaze orange. Several knowledgeable shooters who’ve seen them say they may work fine against dark backgrounds but could be even worse than orange at losing contrast against a light sky. We’ll just have to see. What a target color can do at skeet or trap does not necessarily relate to its usefulness for sporting clays (which are thrown at all angles). Here are some other visibility problems that apply specifically to the latter: 1. Setting tournament targets at a time of day when they may show up fine but failing to check them at other times of day to see how they’ll be for shooters in earlier or later squads. 2. Attempting to justify poorly visible targets with the old argument that sporting is supposed to simulate shooting real birds that are often difficult to see. That old saw got dulled long ago by targets that go straight up, fall straight down, or do other things birds don’t—often at distances hunters wouldn’t risk crippling a real bird. Sporting is good practice for hunting, but it is its own game now. 3. Setting targets into the sky at stations where there will sooner or later be serious sun interference when those identical presentations could have been used at stands with less sun problem; the into-the-sun station could have been used for lower targets at less sun-vulnerable angles. 4. Young target setters who can see any color in any direction and assume everyone else can. 5. Very fast orange midis or minis thrown as the second bird of a pair. Shooters with visual difficulties can have big problems just locating such a hard-to-see second bird. But throwing that same bird first would give all competitors a better chance to see (and read) it because they’d at least know where to watch for it to appear. In other words, everybody would still have to shoot the same targets, but their order could give more of the field a fairer chance. To study how target visibility might be better dealt with in the states, I interviewed some very experienced British range operators and coaches. And the gist of their comments was quite simple. The Brits throw a higher percentage of targets up into the air, often faster or farther than we do, but they use mostly all-black targets to make ’em more visible against the sky. One range owner said that for a tournament of 100 or so shooters, he orders 8,000 black standards, 3,000 black midis, and about 3,000 orange standards (all orange except for black underside). For presentations where the target is first seen against background, then pops into the sky, they use orange targets for visibility against a dark background, but try to present them away from the sun’s direction so the most possible light falls on them. For presentations against green or dark backgrounds for most of the clay’s flight, they also use orange targets, but often add to their visibility by cocking the trap to produce curlers, loopers, or chandelles to show more of the orange face. I asked an English friend who’s a range owner, target setter, and coach his opinion of the visibility of the American targets he’s observed at some of the major tournaments he’s seen here. “Bloody awful on too many stands,” he smiled. “If I presented many difficult-to-see targets at my own range, I’d probably be boycotted if not hanged.” Another Brit, who’s quite famous in England for his course design and course setting, said one major problem he’s observed over here is that many ranges were originally designed years ago by someone not well-enough versed in the game—or trying to work with too little space—who’ve made too many into-the-light presentations unavoidable. “Given those more-difficult circumstances for target setting,” he said, “it’s quite remarkable that Americans so steadfastly rely on orange targets that are more difficult to see in the sky and cost more as well.” But as has been the case since our days as an English colony, we Americans tend to have our own ideas. One sporting range owner told me he uses all-orange targets because orange has to be the most visible color there is or it wouldn’t be the one used on safety vests for hunters. Which might be a more logical argument were hunters not almost invariably viewed against the ground rather than being catapulted into the sky. “I think all this BS about orange being so hard to see got started by old dudes like you,” this guy chuckled, giving me a friendly punch on the arm. “You old guys can’t remember where to look for the next target, so you claim you couldn’t see it. But you sure don’t have any trouble seeing a scoreboard if your score comes up short.” He’s surely right about the forgetting part, but that’s about all. Equating the reading of a scoreboard with how quickly one’s eyes can detect a fleeting orange dot against sky glare is like comparing stationary apples with oranges going 70 mph into sky glare. Glare is much more a problem than is generally realized for shooters of all ages. Polarizing lenses can greatly reduce glare, but most of them previously available in shooting glasses have been traditional green or gray and too dark for many shooting situations. Now there’s a development in “semi-polarizing” glasses in popular shooting colors that significantly reduce glare but are bright enough for all-around shooting use. Lehman Optical (800-255-0205) recently announced these new lenses based on red or yellow polarizing film that with tinting can be made purple, bronze, or other hues. They fit common shooting glasses frames (Ranger, Decot, Lehman, etc.) and are priced quite reasonably for quality polarizing lenses. Lehman has been making shooting glasses for me for years, and based on my years of experience with rotating photographic polarizing filters, I asked why it couldn’t produce glasses with glare reduction yet retained brightness. It could. And shooting buddies who observed me seeing targets better (while testing prototypes) ordered their own and say they’ve also benefited, particularly in dealing with “into-the-light” targets. I’ve found I can wear bright yellow in bright sun without distracting glare or eye fatigue, and one of my favorite colors is a sort of bright “Merthiolate” created from a yellow partial-polarizing lens blank tinted with a touch of red to enhance orange targets. But no polarizer or color tint can compensate for the inevitable loss of light transmission that comes with the passage of years. In very low light, or when targets must be picked up in dark shade, I switch to clear lenses with an anti-reflective coating. Lehman now uses a coating that makes cleaning “AR smudge” a little easier, and Ragsdale ∓mp; Martin Optical (800-688-8466) offers CR-39 or polycarbonate lenses with bonded-on AR coating. These coatings increase light transmission and contrast but must be kept clean or they’re no better than ordinary glass. Since it may only take one not-seen-in-time target to determine who wins a major shoot, I asked a couple of people with NSCA influence if it wouldn’t be fairer to shooters of all ages if more all-black targets were used for sky presentations at the National Championships—bearing in mind previous shooter uproars over orange target visibility on the San Antonio ranges during haze or overcast, where black can be of most advantage. I was patiently advised that with shoots of such magnitude, it would be too complicated even to attempt to customize target color to suit every presentation at every stand, too difficult for target loaders to get the right colors in the right machines, and that inventory and storage problems would be a nightmare. All of which has to make one wonder what there can be about the Atlantic Ocean that makes the colors orange and black so much more complicated on our side of the pond? The British Open, after all, is one of the largest sporting clays events in the world, and they somehow keep their blacks and oranges straight. For that matter, American trap loaders already manage to get minis, battues, midis, etc. on some traps and standards on others, and it would seem that the course setter could easily identify which traps are to throw black targets or orange ones. If necessary, a little painted stake at the trap, black for black, orange for orange, could be used to key the trapper. .25pt'But I doubt any of this is going to happen unless more of us courteously mention target visibility to our local range operators, or maybe even drop a post card to the sporting organizations we pay for target registration and annual dues. Who knows, if the idea gets around, maybe some future sponsor of a major corporate event or national tournament might try announcing in its advertisements and invitations something to this effect: “To improve target visibility for fairer competition by all ages, this event will throw no all-orange targets against light sky, no edge-on black-rimmed orange domes against dark background, and will feature primarily black targets against the sky.” Should that ever happen, I would hope shooters of all ages (whose scores have suffered from poor target visibility) would show up en masse to make that historic event a huge financial success. Shooters may have previously complained, and I have just written. But money talks. NSCA Sporting Clays Hall of Famer Bob Brister has won national championships as a Senior, Veteran, and Super-Veteran. He was one of the principal movers in getting the game started in this country, and a two-day shoot in his honor is one of the major tournaments held in Houston, Texas, each year. At this year’s event, shooters and industry contributors surprised him with the gift of a customized, gas-powered shooting cart in recognition of his contributions to shooting. Bob’s classic book, Shotgunning, The Art & Science, is considered the definitive study of modern shotgun performance in terms of cartridges, leads, patterning, shot stringing, and the realistic effects of ballistics on real-world clay and game shooting. His award-winning collection of 30 short stories, The Golden Crescent, is fiction based on fact about the hunting, fishing, wildlife, and characters of the Gulf Coast. Autographed and personalized copies of the shotgunning book ($22 postpaid) and the leather-bound, color-illustrated Golden Crescent, with 30 paintings by renowned artist John Cowan ($175), are available from Bob Brister, 14758 Kellywood, Dept. SC, Houston, TX 77079; email bobbrist@aol.com Sidebar Sporting, like the eyesight of many of its strongest supporters, is maturing in more ways than one. At the 2001 US Open at M&M in New Jersey, 24.7 percent of shooters in the main event were Veterans and Super-Veterans (220 of them). And that percentage will continue to increase with the overall aging of America, increasing numbers of active retirees with time for shooting and increasing wealth of that segment of the population. The median age of shooters and hunters appears to be rising even more rapidly than that of the general population. Millions of the so-called baby-boomer generation will begin reaching age 55 next year, and they are already the richest segment of the American population. Thus, encouraging older shooters would appear to be good for business and the sport. Mature shooters are also the ones capable of bringing spouses, children, and grandchildren into the game. Industry data indicates they also spend the most on guns and ammo. Orange targets were originally developed to make skeet and trap targets easier to see, and they often stand out beautifully against the sky with the source of light on them (skeet and trap ranges being laid out away from the sun). But sporting clays are launched in all directions, and shooters often have to locate pale-looking orange clays where their color and contrast can seem to just fade into the sky. Shooters of middle age and beyond—even those with 20/20 vision—can have difficulty promptly locating these targets, thus forcing them to take shots at longer, more difficult ranges (if they can find the target at all). Veteran bird hunters who try sporting for the first time or maybe shoot it only a few times each year before hunting season can easily get the idea that they just can’t hit clays because they’re not enough like real birds (which have wing movement to quickly attract the eye). Given more visible target presentations, they might stay in the game long enough to develop the knack of reading the speeds and angles of targets, which are usually moving faster than game birds. Many older skeet and trap shooters try sporting and come away believing they no longer have the reflexes and eyesight to shoot such a game. But given high-visibility targets they can see in time, they’re likely to realize that their reflexes are still quick enough—it’s mainly their eyes that have changed. One reason mature shooters have difficulty picking up orange targets against a light sky and dark targets against a dark background is that as age increases, our eyes gradually lose light transmission capability and brightness of color perception. This is simply a medical fact (there are charts showing light transmission relative to age), and the individual may have 20/20 vision and still have trouble seeing fast-moving targets in low light or low-contrast situations. Visual changes that occur from about age 40 on can be so gradual, they may not be noticed—until the eyes are asked to locate something quickly—like swift little flying saucers.
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