shooting glasses from an expert

First topic message reminder :

Shooting glassesi

Fair point.  Pistol shooters prefer a slightly blurry target.  HOW blurry seems personal choice, but here are your options:

1.  Take your distance and add +0.75.  This will put your focal point at 1.3m, or 52.5"  Target and rear sight will have balanced focus, and this is too sharp for your tastes.
2.  Take your distance and add +1.00.  Your focal point is at 1.0m, or 39"
3.  Take your distance and add +1.25.  Your focal point is at 0.8m, or 31.5".  At this power, most shooters find the target is too blurry unless you start introducing an aperture, or you have very bright light, so your eye naturally constricts the pupil.
4.  Take your distance and add +1.50.  Your focal point is at 0.66m, or 26".  At this distance your sights will be perfect and the target should be very blurry - too blurry for most.

Next step of 1.75 is probably too strong, as 22.5" focal length is actually putting your focus closer than the sight, so the sharpness of the sight will start to decrease.

So bottom line, there are only about 3 or 4 choices, and it sounds like you already have 2 of them.

shootingsight wrote:I don't recommend taking a handgun to a doctor's office.  The VAST majority of pistol shooters I have supplied lenses to, when they were not using an aperture, resulted in the addition of +0.75 diopters to their distance prescription, so for most people, this is an excellent start for less than the cost of the doctor visit with your gun.

For some, I think this may be interpreted as self serving because you do not do eye exams but you do sell shooting lenses.

As I have written many times before, "any" plus lens will help.  There are those who would be served by your recommendation because they do not intend to have their eyes checked.  That's OK.  I'm constantly being confronted by club members who always tell me, "I need to see you for my shooting glasses" but never do, for over 10 years.  That's OK.  There are those who post that they have astigmatism and don't see the red dot or iron sights well, and never get the proper vision correction.  That's OK.

When I started shooting (once again) in 2003, I enjoyed our sport, the people and the smell of burnt gunpowder along with the smoke.  I appreciated the efforts of those who run the matches, and the knowledgeable members of the Bullseye-L list who offered sound advice.  I soon found out that there was something I could contribute with eyes and vision.  I started doing shooter's eye exams and sharing some of my insights which I believe have been helpful.  For years, I DID NOT CHARGE EXTRA for my shooter's exam which typically run about 2 hours.  My reward was to meet some of you fine folks from around the country.

It meant more to me that shooters benefited from a sentence, a paragraph, or an entire article I've written than to make some money on the exam and shooting glasses.  In fact, I donated a significant sum for the benefit of Camp Perry volunteers during the National Matches, enough to pay for a Les Baer Wadcutter.  These volunteers such as John Rickards would spend hours out in the field without a lunch break.

I take pride in being able to listen to people and put aside my years of higher education and preconceived thoughts.  When Philip Hemphill wrote, "...I bring my guns in to his (doctor's) office for sight picture correction.  I have found that this is the only way I can get a correct adjustment for vision," I LISTENED.  He used a +0.25 add.

When John Bickar said he wanted to emphasize the front sight and not the bullseye, I LISTENED.  We found that a +1.50 add was the best choice which gave his preferred sight picture appearance. 

With such a wide range of lens powers, my next thought was to put together a lens kit of all the powers, including tint samples.  One was donated to the NRA in Virginia and another one for members of the Bullseye-L to use and experiment out at the range for NO CHARGE. 

If readers think of the whole picture, when recommending eye exam/shooter's exam is not needed, the eye health would also be neglected.  Some of my patients come in for their regular eye exam only when they need their shooter's exam.  There was a case of a new patient who came in for his shooter's exam (rifle) in which this shooter developed cataracts secondary to unsupervised use of steroids.  He thought that his eyeglasses were off.  Another case worth mentioning involved a non shooter who developed Glaucoma during the time he thought he would skip his annual eye checkup.

Hope these points made makes sense.

Best Regards to All,

Norman

I gave Dr. Wong's guide to shooting glasses to my Ophthalmologist. She used it to fashion my shooting glasses.

I did bring my guns into her office for that. It worked out great.

Thanks, Dr. Wong.

I do not advocate people buying lenses instead of getting an eye exam.  When I say add +0.75 to a distance prescription, I am specifying an add to the distance prescription you need to go to an eye doctor to get.  The add of +0.75 means they DO need to go to their eye doctor, but that they can then calculate a reasonable starting point to a shooting correction by using optical physics, rather than having to go to the expense and difficulty of finding a follow-up doctor who allows guns, and risking the knee-jerk panic that you run into when the public sees someone with a gun.

Furthermore, while I do sell lenses, my primary goal is to share the optical math as a free service to the shooting community, so they can get their own lenses made.  I help people do the math to adjust their prescriptions, then send them to Zenni Optical more often than I can count, and I don't make a dime off the time I spent doing it.  If the answer can be achieved inexpensively by applying simple math, that is the greatest benefit that can be delivered to shooters.

I get it that some shooters have personal preferences that fall outside the norm, and for them a 1:1 interaction is appropriate.  But in 10 years of working with shooters, both in a purely theoretical capacity, as well as 1:1, I can say that the vast majority of them end up preferring the theoretical solution that optical physics predicts.

Art Neergaard
ShootingSight llc

ChrisD wrote:Very interesting article and one I really need some help on. Just got prescribed glasses earlier this year and have trifocal progressives. My shooting stance is now all screwed up, strictly using Iron sights. I'm stationed in Germany, so it's difficult working with local optical shops to try and get some glasses for shooting (ISSF Pistol). I've been thinking of ordering some online and having them shipped over.  Any advice?

You should be able to get the shooting glass frames in Germany from one of the shooting sports retailers like Gehmann.

ChrisD:  "Just got prescribed glasses earlier this year and have trifocal progressives. My shooting stance is now all screwed up, strictly using Iron sights."

If you got progressive lenses, they know your prescription for varying distances.  You can have them make you another pair of glasses, with a prescription for the distance to your iron sights - or you can just ask for a prescription for using your computer.  Just ask them to use polycarbonate lenses for safety.

That won't solve the problem Mike M suggested an answer for, but it will solve your shooting stance issue - you can do things like you used to. 

Progressive lenses are not good for shooting with iron sights, as you need to move your head up or down to get the proper part of the lens in front of your eye.  I have a pair - tried them.  For red dot sight, they worked fine for me.