I've seen the light

Rink lighting comes in 3 main types...fluorescent, mercury or sodium vapor and now we are starting to see LED lights in some rinks too.

Catch the peak of the wave...

Most of the lighting that we have is flickering on and off all the time...just at a rate faster than our eyes can see it. When we use faster shutter speeds needed to freeze the action, this can result in the camera capturing a bright or a dark cycle, affecting the picture significantly. The pro end of the camera range (e.g. Canon 1D X II or 7DII) can sometimes detect these variations and adjust to capture the brightest shot. This "flicker detection" does not change the timing of the shot significantly...the delay is usually less than 10ms... but it does ensure you capture the best shot possible. 

Fluorescent Lighting

This is probably the most common and provides reasonably consistent lighting. Once calibrated by setting the white balance I find that that the temperature of the light does not change significantly during the cycle and so this is mainly a brightness impact. Over the course of a season the lights degrade and you can really notice a rink that has just swapped out the tubes !

Vapor Lighting

These are still common and the performance is very variable, some rinks are well lit with minimal impact of the cycling, others suffer very badly. This type is illustrated in the picture below.

The biggest impact is on the color cycling of these lights. This can result in some shots with a blue cast, others with a red one. These are usually the cause of a white balance calibration going wrong and it why we check before the game starts.

LED Lighting

We are starting to see LED lighting coming into rinks in some places. This is shown in the shot below,

These are small and low power but provide good brightness. They are a "blue" white but once calibrated can give good results and although we see some brightness cycling I have not noticed any color cycling effects yet.

Understand what you have

The moral is, check out the lights in the rink and understand their limitations. If you are lucky enough to have a camera with anti-flicker technology, learn how to use it as this is the application that the feature was really created for. Even without anti-flicker (as I am today), using a careful white balance calibration before the game and understanding the properties of the lights can help improve your photography in the arena environment.