Viral Olympic Shooter

First topic message reminder :

https://www.npr.org/2024/08/01/nx-s1-5060078/turkey-shooter-olympics-glasses-gear-silver

This Olympic airgun shooter has gone viral.  Is the flip-down blinder really necessary, or helpful?  

He doesn't think so.

I have used a piece of translucent ("Scotch") tape on my glasses for about 40 years.  I used to wear contact lenses when shooting, and had a piece on my safety glasses that would last for a decade or more.  

Now I shoot with prescription glasses, and I have a piece of tape that I take on & off.  The trick is to fold over about 1/4" on one end to serve as a "handle".  I have a smooth bit of metal on my shooting box, and I stick it to that between sessions.  I usually get several months out of a piece of tape before it gets a bit grubby.

You want to make it reasonably small to maximize peripheral vision.  That actually helps your stability.  I coach college students, and we occasionally have one that will "wall-paper" their non-shooting lens.  A few years ago, we had a student that complained about getting dizzy until we got them to use a single small piece of tape.  Problem solved.

We shoot ISSF pistol, and the rules limit the width of the blinder to 30 mm, which is just under 1.2 inches.  With a bit of experimenting & practice to get it located right, a standard 3/4" wide piece of tape works fine.

xmastershooter wrote:

2.  Dr. Wong interviewed something like a dozen shooters about their shooting, including asking them about lenses.  They were older (age not given, but not college kids), and were roughly evenly split between using +0.50 and using +1.00, almost no one used +0.75.

In this survey of the nation's top 16 shooters, 15 gave their ages while only 1 did not.

Norman H. Wong, O.D.

Now if only I still had 30YO eyeballs as I did when you did that survey

john bickar wrote:
Now if only I still had 30YO eyeballs as I did when you did that survey

Nevertheless, John Bickar continues to be one of the nation's top BE shooters! Not too shabby you old geezer.

Now, do you pronounce that Gee-zer, or Gee-zah.

I'm in the Boston area, and it's definitely Gee-zah around here...

xmastershooter wrote:

john bickar wrote:
Now if only I still had 30YO eyeballs as I did when you did that survey

Nevertheless, John Bickar continues to be one of the nation's top BE shooters! Not too shabby you old geezer.

Wow, John a geezer? I remember shooting at the Frank J. Bickar Memorial Match at Canton-McKinley and John was just a kid. The competitors took up a collection to help him along in his bullseye pistol journey. Now I feel like I belong in a museum with all the dinosaur bones!

BE Mike wrote:

xmastershooter wrote:

john bickar wrote:
Now if only I still had 30YO eyeballs as I did when you did that survey

Nevertheless, John Bickar continues to be one of the nation's top BE shooters! Not too shabby you old geezer.

Wow, John a geezer? I remember shooting at the Frank J. Bickar Memorial Match at Canton-McKinley and John was just a kid. The competitors took up a collection to help him along in his bullseye pistol journey. Now I feel like I belong in a museum with all the dinosaur bones!

Point of fact: that was 30 years ago.

I can't speak for you, but I know I've aged a bit in those 30 years.

I appreciate the generosity of you and others in our sport, and I try to return it in kind. One of the gratifying developments I've seen in those 30 years is that at that time I was the Ohio Junior team, and fundraising was "pass the hat." Now there's an extremely successful ORPA Junior Team, with organized fundraisers like 50/50 raffles, (delicious delicious) BBQ, and the like.

john bickar wrote:

I can't speak for you, but I know I've aged a bit in those 30 years.

I can only speak for the last 20 years but I can confirm that you have aged in that time. Of course I have successfully made it to the 'decrepit old fart' stage in the same time so maybe I shouldn't be commenting.

gwhite wrote:I'm in the Boston area, and it's definitely Gee-zah around here...

Correct - it's Gee-zah. In your best sarf landun cab driver voice.

Would our fellow Bostonian shooters call John's last name "Bic-kah?"

Not unless they can out shoot him (unlikely...)

Having lived for almost a year in Cambridge (owah faih city!), Massachusetts, I can tell you that my given name was pronounced "Jawn" by the residents.

shootingsight wrote:
Another thought: we talk about blinders and maybe scotch tape to blur the image, but how about just messing up your focus?  Shooters typically like to add between about +0.5 to +1.00 diopters to their distance vision to sharpen their focus on the sights.  If you add nothing to the non-shooting eye, it will stay relaxed while focusing on the target.  But if you added something like a +2.00 or even +3.00 to the non shooting eye, it would be focused at about 18" from you.  Great for writing in your logbook, or seeing the adjustments for the sights, but it would totally blur the target, and also blur the sights, so maybe your brain would just ignore the image from your non-shooting eye.

I'll go try this.  I'm not a bullseye pistol shooter, but I can make glasses.  I'll report back, and possibly recruit some actual good shooters to see if it works.

In closing, here is the data I have on power to add for shooting.  There are three data sets:
1.  I supply lenses to the MIT pistol team every year.  All kids 18-22 years old.  They are split, with about half adding +0.50 and half adding +0.75 to their distance vision prescription.  Interestingly, almost all of them have distance prescriptions that are in the -5.00 diopter range, which means they are very near sighted.  Dunno if near sighted drives you to reading more books, or the other way around, it is just an interesting statistic.

2.  Dr. Wong interviewed something like a dozen shooters about their shooting, including asking them about lenses.  They were older (age not given, but not college kids), and were roughly evenly split between using +0.50 and using +1.00, almost no one used +0.75.

3.  I measured about 30 shooters up at Camp Perry during the National Matches.  About 70% liked a +1.00 the best, with maybe 15% liking +0.75 and 15% liking +1.25.

My conclusion is that if you are young, +0.5 to +0.75 seems right, and as you progress and start to get presbyopia at around 40 years old, that number increases to around +1.00.  Obviously, there is a personal preference issue at play.  The stronger the lens, the closer your focal point, which will sharpen the sights, and blur the target.  However how much blur a shooter wants on the target is a choice, so different shooters will like different things.

As someone who currently wears glasses (-1.75), what is the best way for those who rely on glasses to figure what would work best for them without buy a ton of lens? @"shootingsight" Did your research cover stigmatisms? There are a couple shooters I have noticed which will use contacts AND shooting frames with the iris.

Wildexpert,

Everything being discussed is an ADD, which means you add it to the distance prescription sphere value of your aiming eye.  So, if your distance is -1.75, and you want to try the +1.00 add, you would get a -0.75 lens.

This math does cover astigmatism.  Astigmatism is when your eye has a slightly uneven surface, so instead of the surface being shaped like a slice off a basketball, it is a slice off the side of a football; you have one radius of curvature in one direction, and a different radius in a perpendicular direction.  The degree of difference between the two axes is the cylinder value, and the direction of the football is the axis value.  The doctor corrects this error by giving you a similarly football shaped lens, but orients it perpendicular to the football in your eye, so everywhere your eye is fat, the lens is thin, and everywhere your eye is thin, the lens is fat, negating the effect of the bulge (interestingly, if you turn an astigmatic lens 90 degrees, both fat portions line up and both this sections do as well, it makes your astigmatism twice as bad).  Anyhow, the values determined by the doctor for cylinder and axis are usually just kept unchanged for pistol shooters.  You only adjust the sphere, where an increase will bring your focal point closer, and going more negative will push your focal point out.

How you implement this correction depends a little on the type of shooting and how strong your prescription is.
 - The two things that cause distortion in a lens are if you look through it off-center, and worse, if you look through it non-perpendicular.  For pistol shooters, this is not normally a huge issue, as you can tilt your head slightly so you are looking through the center of the lens in your glasses.  For rifle shooters it is more problematic, as prone position leaves you looking through the inside upper corner of the lens at a strong angle.  This induces an astigmatic error into the lens.  This is where the fancy shooting frames come in, because they allow you to twist the lens holder relative to your eye, to get the lens back perpendicular to your line of sight.
-  The second thing the lens holders do is give you a platform to attach a variable iris.  You can probably search the term iris here to get a lot of discussion, but basically, it gives you a bigger depth of field, which improves focus, especially on the target.  Not all pistol shooters like that.  Also, it restricts light coming in.  Outdoor shooters have plenty of light, indoor shooters do not always.  Some ranges are less well lit.  Also, they are expensive.  EyePal just sticks on your glasses and costs less.
- Contacts with shooting glasses is again a personal choice, depending on your condition.  If you have a negative prescription, like you do, the further the lens is from your eye, the more it shrinks your image.  For you, the effect is small enough you can likely ignore it, but for someone who is -5.00 or -6.00, the effect is severe.  So you minimize this by using contacts, so the distance from your eye to the lens is effectively zero.  You could get contacts with the +1.00 built in, but then you cannot see distance properly after you are done, until you switch contacts.  So it is simply easier to keep your distance contacts and wear +1.00 glasses that you can take off easily.

Net, for you, if you want to try eg +1.00, you would add +1.00 to your sphere value of -1.75, to arrive at an adjusted sphere value of -0.75.  You would keep your cylinder value and axis unchanged.


Art Neergaard
ShootingSight llc
www.shootingsight.com

On another subject, I tried my idea for an alternative to blinders, and it appears to work.

I am right handed and left eye dominant, so I have always used a blinder or closed one eye.  We have discussed that you want a translucent blinder to keep your pupil dilations balanced.

Instead of a blinder, I simply put a strong positive lens in my non-shooting eye.  I added +1.00 to my shooting eye, and added either +2.00 or +3.00 to my non shooting eye (I did not have a +2.50 lens handy), without using a blinder.  It seems to work just holding the lens blanks up in front of me.  I think both did it, though I have not actually mounted the lenses into frames yet.  The high power lenses in my non shooting eye are great for seeing my logbook, or making sight adjustments, but the focus is so close the target is horrible, and the sights are blurry as well.  So when I form a sight picture, my brain uses the sharper image from my non-dominant eye over the blurry image of my dominant eye and I do not need a blinder.

I need to play some more to see if +2.00, +2.50, and +3.00 all work equally well, and I suppose different people have different degrees of dominance, but the concept has enough merit to warrant further work.

Art Neergaard
ShootingSight llc
www.shootingsight.com

Many of the college students I coach wear glasses, and are very nearsighted.  Until we can get them set up with custom shooting glasses, we use a clip-on boost lens like these:

https://shootingsight.com/?product=clip-on-flip-lens

Although +0.75D is theoretically better, most of the beginners chose +0.5D because they don't like how fuzzy the target gets.  Once they get used to it, some of them opt to go for the stronger lens later.

There are clip-on two lens reading lenses, but they tend to only go down to +1.0D.  You can also get "computer glasses" in +0.5D and +0.75D, but they are hard to find.

Instead of a blinder, I simply put a strong positive lens in my non-shooting eye.  I added +1.00 to my shooting eye, and added either +2.00 or +3.00 to my non shooting eye (I did not have a +2.50 lens handy), without using a blinder.  It seems to work just holding the lens blanks up in front of me.  I think both did it, though I have not actually mounted the lenses into frames yet.  The high power lenses in my non shooting eye are great for seeing my logbook, or making sight adjustments, but the focus is so close the target is horrible, and the sights are blurry as well.  So when I form a sight picture, my brain uses the sharper image from my non-dominant eye over the blurry image of my dominant eye and I do not need a blinder.

I need to play some more to see if +2.00, +2.50, and +3.00 all work equally well, and I suppose different people have different degrees of dominance, but the concept has enough merit to warrant further work.

You will need a few test subjects to evaluate their responses. Along the same thoughts, I've had much success with shooters who want to see the iron sights with their dominant eye and distance with their non-dominant eye. However, to prevent that dizzy sensation when the full distance Rx was given, +0.25 to +0.50 over the distance RX proved to solved the problem. This was written in my guide for the eye doctors doing a shooter's eye exam. I would be curious with your findings with the higher adds.  Thanks.

I shot with contact lenses for a long time, and as I got older, they set me up with "monovision" correction.  My right (slightly dominant) eye was corrected for good distance vision, and my left eye was set up for reading.  At the moment, my reading eye has an additional +2.5D correction. 

If I was shooting with a red dot, I used safety glasses with a piece of tape in front of my left eye, and if I was shooting with iron sights, I'd use a lens (+1.0D for indoors, +1.25D for outdoors) for aiming, and a translucent blinder on my left eye.  

There were a few times where I was dry firing or some such, and skipped the safety glasses with the dot.  I had very little trouble with the image from my left eye, because it was focused in so close.  I don't recall trying to shoot iron sights with my blinder flipped up, but I wouldn't be surprised if I also don't really need the blinder due to the large offset in focus between the two eyes.

I'll throw something out there that maybe will make Dr. Wong have a heart attack.

I'm mildly myopic (nearsighted). I wear glasses for driving, and for recognizing the faces of shooters that I see from farther away than five firing points. I spend 8 hours a day in front of a computer (for which I don't wear glasses).

In the past, Dr. Wong has given me one prescription for iron sights (plus add), and another prescription for the dot ("minus subtraction," I guess?). The "dot" prescription was essentially the same as my "driving" glasses, so something like a -0.75 (I don't recall the exact numbers and I can't find them.)

Dr. Wong, to the detriment of many including myself, selfishly decided to retire and close his practice, so I had to go find an optometrist off the shelf. What a jerk to consider the welfare of himself and his family above the needs of the Bullseye community, amirite? (This is sarcasm, BTW.)

The past few years, I have been using my distance prescription for shooting iron sights. Although I could, I'll not write a book about that. I can say that I've had some recent success with that combination standing in the middle of a f*cking field at Camp Perry.

With this distance prescription in my shooting glasses, from my journal on 7.20.2024, "The way I was seeing the sights this morning, I would marry them and bear 8 or 9 of their children."

I think the relevant document is "Iron Sight Visual Perception Under The Open Sun," with special emphasis on "perception" and "under the open sun."

I consider this article to be the foundational research into this esoteric topic. I was happy to participate 15+ years ago when I had much younger eyes. I'd be interested to see a followup with some of the current top shooters.

john bickar wrote:I'll throw something out there that maybe will make Dr. Wong have a heart attack.

Yes, Doc: I was using a minus prescription (myopia correction) in my shooting glasses, while shooting iron sights, at age 46 and 47, to win the 2023 and 2024 President's Pistol Match. 2023 was overcast and beautiful (for third relay; sorry for the rest of y'all); 2024 first relay was sunny and beautiful (again, sorry for the rest of y'all).

Jawn Bickah lives in a different universe!  That’s why he shoots the way he shoots. No never mind about the vision as much as his impeccable trigger control. 

I have great memory, so much that I recalled JB used his iron sight plus lens for the red dot scope when he transitioned from iron sights. (Unless he was joshing me!……… No, he wouldn’t do that…..???)

Another unique JB preference was the use of +1.50 add at age 30’s for iron sights when most shooters don’t have problems seeing iron sights. JB insisted on a blurred bullseye, very blurred.

A little note about our eyes…….at ages in the mid 40’s, we still have 3.50 diopters to 4 diopters of accommodation (focusing power). So while using the distance Rx, we may still be able to zoom into iron sight clear focus in which only about 1 diopter is needed.

Although not typical, a 70 year old geezer can still force out 0.50 diopter of accommodation and may still see an acceptable sight picture with irons. Once after cataract surgery, that ain’t possible any more.

Now that JB and I spilled the beans on his vision preferences, while using this information, we can attempt to see like JB and shoot like him. Trigger control always beats vision.

Doc, you've managed to bring me back around from my usual "snark mode" into serious mode.

Given your profession and your decades of experience in the realm of visual acuity, I'm quite curious about what you've said about trigger.

I've always been a "feel" or "trigger-focus" shooter. I.e., my conscious focus is on moving the trigger and I let my subconscious take care of the sights. (From conversations with other top shooters, this puts me in a minority that is maybe 10%-20% of top shooters).

This is a wide-ranging subject so I'll ask you one question to narrow it in: if a person has good visual acuity*, do you think it's reasonable to delegate the visual parts of the shot process to the subconscious and put the conscious focus on squeezing the trigger?

* I have an appendix for this from Ben A. about "critical vision". I'll try to pull it up.

Copypasta. I never got permission to repost this from a person who goes by "BEA" on TargetTalk; I feel confident in saying that I know this person; I have shot shoulder-to-shoulder with him as both competitor and teammate; I consider him a friend and a mentor (if he'd have me). His bona fides are legit.

This is from a few years back; it was so good that I saved it offline to be able to refer back to.

Text is not mine; rather his.


"I think the ability to call shots is a key factor in what makes some shooters better than others.  It takes critical vision, the ability to see the slightest imperfections in sight alignment, to effectively call shots.  Some shooters no doubt have good holds, but lack critical vision.  They are good scope shooters but not reliably so with open sights.  Then the opposite occurs too, good vision but so so hold. The shooters that excel have both the hold and critical vision...and the mental determination to bring everything together."

"You are correct Rover in that AP uncovers all flaws and errors.  AP requires supreme sight alignment and trigger control, as does FP.  However, I am tempted to say that critical vision is something you either have or do not have.  I am not sure it is something you can develop.  I do believe it is something that you can have and refine with training.  I know and have known some excellent bullseye shooters (with scopes) over the years that do lots of training, but they never reach the same level of accomplishment in international pistol.  I believe this is due to having good holds and effective training, but they simply lack the critical vision needed for success with open sights."

This is a wide-ranging subject so I'll ask you one question to narrow it in: if a person has good visual acuity*, do you think it's reasonable to delegate the visual parts of the shot process to the subconscious and put the conscious focus on squeezing the trigger?

Holy smokes, this may be above my pay grade! I suspect most shooters with excellent vision may try to dress up the sight picture too much in that it would affect the trigger pull. This would include marksmen up to high masters. For myself at the range, I’m still pleasantly surprised when a shot is a 10 when my hold seems to be out of the 10 ring but the trigger pull was smooth and deliberate.

Good vision is still critical but we need to step back a little and let the mind and the trigger finger do its job. I guess I answered your question in layman’s terms.