TargetTalk

karats wrote:Cutting to the chase: I'm left-eye dominant, shoot rifle lefty style pretty well.
Pistol is another matter entirely. I'm talking one hand shooting. I bought lefty grips
for my Tau and I'm trying to train myself to shoot that way. Very slow progress.
I'm looking for advice here...should I revert to right handed or not to give up trying left handed.
Your turn...and thank you.

Karats....Do not listen to the Naysayers. Do not change your cross-dominance.
Sorry that you already bought a set of left handed grips; that wasn't necessary.
I've been aware of my cross-dominance since 1972. I do have pistol grips
built with several degrees of rotation. You also may find that a more straight on
stance is helpful. I shoot with both eyes open and no blinder for my non-dominant eye.
If you obtain a newer technology pistol, you will find that a rotation adjustment
is a feature with most contemporary designs. Good luck with your cross-dominance;
and stop worring about it. Just shoot(and dry fire)!

Tony

Spencer wrote:

ShootingSight wrote:... just closing the dominant eye is fine...

??????????in which universe?

I have resisted the temptation to comment on most of ShootingSight's opinions on pistol shooting - but this latest is just too much.

Sorry. You did get me there. I slipped and made a rifle comment without realizing that pistol was different. In rifle, you cannot chose the handedness and the eye separately - you cannot shoot right handed but left eyed, so the solution is to close the dominant eye if you are opposite handed.

I do stand by my hot needle trick, though.

ShootingSight wrote:In rifle, you cannot chose the handedness and the eye separately - you cannot shoot right handed but left eyed, so the solution is to close the dominant eye if you are opposite handed.

You certainly can in ISSF shooting.

Rule 7.4.1.3.5
A prism or mirror device may be used when shooting from the right shoulder while aiming with the left eye or vice versa providing it does not have a magnifying lens or lenses. It must not be used when shooting from the right shoulder when using the right eye or from the left shoulder when using the left eye.

I'll admit that it's not particularly common, but it's possible and permitted.

Wow! Rough crowd.

OK, let me step back. My expertise is in optics and rifle shooting. In my experience and research, I have not run across any data that supports that closing one eye is actually a problem in aiming. However, aiming problems of this type are not actually optical issues but brain issues. We need a neurologist to provide an authoritative perspective here.

In Service Rifle, I have neither run across a rule, nor an example of someone shooting right handed and left eyed, or the other way around. I suppose it is allowed, but I am not aware of anyone having done it successfully. Though I can say that a lens/mirror/prism is NOT allowed if it is attached to the Service Rifle. I do owe beers to David for finding the rule that allows it (WTF were they thinking?).

In pistol, I had never considered that you could shoot right handed but aim with your left eye, since you do not form a cheek weld, as you do in rifle. My initial statement was meant to convey that I have never seen any scientific evidence that closing one eye is a detriment to aiming.

So, on the issue of if you are right handed but left eyed, should you keep both eyes open and use your dominant left to aim, or should you close your left eye and use your non-dominant to aim, I actually have no opinion or expertise. However if, in whatever format you seek to compete, you choose to close one eye, I restate that I have never seen any scientific evidence that closing one eye is a problem.

I suppose, since the non-humor endowed grammar police are out, that I also ought to withdraw my recommendation to poke yourself in the eye with a hot needle. My liability insurance does not cover this procedure.

The only hypothesis I have ever read or heard about regarding closing the non-dominant eye is that it requires tensing some muscles that theoretically should be relaxed for the best shot. YurYev was quite adamant about it.

YurYev also did not provide any data to support the hypothesis.

Were you reffering to a sewing needle, darning needle, hypodermic needle, or knitting needle? Inquiting minds want to know. I come from the land of the Space Needle but I suppose that would be awkward.

wrt ShootingSight's latest post on this thread:
* not a particularly "rough crowd", but certainly many are fairly exact (maybe sometimes pedantic, but speaking for David L and myself, not rough),
* closing the non-shooing eye leads to a) tiring the muscles around the eye (best avoided, particularly for precision events/stages), and b) unequal light entering the eyes (best avoided as it 'confuses' the pupils) and tires the eyes.
* have a look at the ISSF Finals videos - if keeping both eyes open is good enough for the best...

I know I could (should?) have moved this to the Pistol forum when the thread started, but it's probably of interest to the Bullseye shooters as well.

Another consideration : cross dominant shooting is much easier for someone with long arms and narrow pupillary distance compared to someone with wide shoulders, short arms and wide pupillary distance.

The rough crowd comment was a joke. Knitting needles are more blunt, and typically hurt more, particularly if you are not used to it.

The point of my post was to try and separate that which I have found evidence to support, and that which is oft repeated, but I have never found any proof of it in the time I spent studying optics and vision. To wit: when you close one eye, your pupils do not get 'confused'. Pupils do not think. They are controlled by the autonomic nervous system, which regulates muscular activity in each eye independently, without passing the information through the brain. If you cover one eye with your hand, your open eye does not mis-regulate the light coming in so the image appears overly bright or overly dim. Nor does your brain have any difficulty figuring out how bright it is in the room because only one eye sees light. When an eye doctor measures your vision, they give you an opaque occluder to hold in front of the other eye. If that screwed up the focus in the eye they were trying to measure, it wouldn't be a very good measurement technique.

If you use an occluder, some people prefer opaque, some like translucent, and some close the eye, like the young lady pictured below. So that is a preference, not a neurological requirement.

Closing the non shooting eye does make the opposite pupil dilate more to accommodate for the difference in light. Stand in front of a mirror and you'll see for yourself. Squinting also affects the muscles around the shooting eye - again a mirror is your friend. So both eyes open makes most sense, with a blinder that allows light through.

Rob.

Serious question - if you close the non-dominant eye, which causes your open eye to dialate more, could that not help you focus more intensly on the front sight since your depth of field will be very shallow?

It is actually the opposite of what an iris is trying to do but it seems to me with pistol shooting, if your glasses are set up to get perfect vision on the front sight, and you complement that with a shallow depth of field, that might really focus you on concentrating on the front site.

Squinting will work to dilate pupils, but it is not a muscular effect. When you squint, the eyelid partially occludes the pupil, reducing the amount of light entering the eye. With less light coming in, the pupil will dilate to compensate.

You don't want a shallow depth of field, or your target will be unacceptably blurry. You want to concentrate of the front sight, but not actually 'focus' on it in the optical sense.

The perfect place to focus is beyond the front sight, so your depth of field is centralized between the sights and the target. Feedback I have gotten from pistol shooters is that it appears the best place is the hyperfocal distance of the rear sight, which will make the rear and the target equally crisp, and the front sight sharper than both of them.

@ShootingSight.

As Rob has pointed out, you seem to be mistaken about the pupils acting independently.
As I understand it, there is a reflex action, known as the ipsilateral consensual reflex, where light shone into one eye, causes both pupils to constrict.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pupillary_light_reflex

Another effect: direction of gaze.
When shooting a bow or rifle, you look "inwards" toward your nose.
Normal onehanded pistol shooting directs you gaze "outwards" unless you add lots of extra unnatural twist to your neck.

I feel that my eyes work better with the active/dominant eye looking towards my nose. I've even contemplated having a go at shooting AP lefthanded because of this. I think people often have to much respect for the "barrier" of switching sides.
I believe that seeing your nose as a reference point in the field of vision aids spatial orientation and balance. I also believe that having both eyes open (and not covered) has similar benefits.

Maybe someone else is able to supply proof or support for these ideas?

@luftskytter:

I'm not sure that you are quite right about directing one's gaze outward (distally) in a typical shooting stance. If you look at the picture of Roberto Di Donna, he is looking almost dead on straight ahead. This is the way I learned to shoot from the people on this forum as well as from other texts.

I think there is necessarily a compromise in position between a comfortable neck posture and alignment of the axis of the gun with the arm while looking straight out. If you imagine the eye, the sight and the shoulder as three points, the only position in which they are collinear is with the arm extended directly to the side and this requires the neck be twisted in an uncomfortable position. I read somewhere that this posture is unstable because twisting the neck that much interferes with the ability to balance. Whatever the reason, I found that I swayed a lot more when I tried it. My current posture is with my heels ~11" (28 cm) apart, toes pointed slightly outward, at about a 40 degree angle from the barrel axis and I have no discomfort turning my head to look straight out.

Of course, there are many much better shooters on this forum and I would like to hear their take on turning the shooting eye distally vs. proximally.

As far as shooting with both eyes open, I do that all the time. The only time I have a problem with it is when target carriers in other lanes to my right are moving back and forth which tends to be quite distracting.

Roger

I tried Rob's trick, and it does not work with a mirror ... at least not while I'm wearing reading glasses to try and see what is going on.

However I used a macro lens on my iPhone, and by golly, it works. When I close one eye, the pupil in the other eye dilates, so this would sacrifice depth of field.

Yeah, following the advice of many I've been using a translucent occluder - the stock Champion one lately - since it seems my depth of field is slightly improved when lots of light can get to the non-aiming eye through and around that. I even experimented for a target or two last month with shining a small LED flashlight into my non-aiming eye to further boost this effect, and sure enough depth of field improved while aiming... but it was distracting. Perhaps a soft-glowing sort of thing, like an LED at the edge of a frosted sheet of plastic, illuminating the whole rectangle?

Of course that sort of product would only be a potential help to those who allow for increased apparent depth of field being useful. That runs counter to the mainstream wisdom that a big blurry blob of blackness is ideal for the target. I happen to have given up on the blurry blob, preferring to focus on the 10 ring and the little centre ring within it when my eyes are feeling really sharp, the front sight being slightly blurred and the rear sight slightly more so, though really the bigness of the rear sight helps keep it appearing somewhat sharp. I have the most trouble with this approach when the light on the target is dim, as the bulbs are at my club for some reason. At home I see the white lines in the black, no problem.

RandomShotz wrote: BTW, I was looking at the pic of Antoaneta Boneva, and my elbow don't bend like that! She obviously has a built-in offset that facilitates the use of the contralateral eye.

Looks to me like she's rotated her elbow so bends in the vertical plane -- not that she's bending it, just explaining how she's rotated it. I know because its the only way I can hold a pistol with the backstrap in the web of my hand and still have it pointed at the target w/o breaking my wrist -- my elbow was dislocated playing rugby and two operations later I still can't straighten it. But it hurts to rotated it like that for long. So instead I usually hold it with a lot of space between the fat of my palm and the backstrap -- got to get some putty, wish I had bought those offset Rinks mentioned earlier!

Oh, and keeping with OPs question, I'm RH and L Eye myself. I occlude my dominant eye using clip on sunglasses on my corrective lenses only I've removed the lens from the right side.

-= Jab

Not a shooting video, but apropos elbow hyperextension:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R--_5vEP ... ure=relmfu

Nice looking young lady, but the real event is around the 2 minute mark.

Roger