TargetTalk

Hi everyone, I'm new to shooting and am on my own with my training. I am 24 years old, and I am slightly nearsighted. I am cross dominant, being left eyed and right handed. I shoot right handed skeet, cross handed pistol, and I can switch between right and left with a rifle, but prefer to shoot righty.

My glasses prescription is -0.75L, -1.00R.

I prefer to shoot with scopes because the crosshair and target are always in sharp focus... but I've started to touch upon air rifles and pistols, so iron sights are in my future.


In my research, I have heard many say that the only thing that matters is to be able to see your front sight clearly.

Without glasses I can see my front sight clear as day, but can't see the bull in the distance. I aim for the center of the overall mass of the target, instead of aiming *at* the bull.

With glasses, I can barely see the sights, but I can pick out the bull and individual bullet holes in the distance. I aim for the bull, ignoring the overall mass of the target.

Strangely enough, my groupings between the two are very similar. One is not much better than the other. Perhaps even my no glasses groupings are better.

But if you can't tell where you're hitting, what's the point?

Can anyone give me some guidance here? I'm reaching analysis paralysis.

I, was you,when I was in my 20's. being slightly near sighted when shooting irons is great in pistol because the irons are in sharp focus. And the target is blurry.

This is ideal, because one of the worst habits is letting your eye jump back and forth between the target and the sights. In pistol, the sights are almost everything. And triggering is the rest of the equation.

As far as rifle, this may not be the case, but as long as you can actually see the target bull, and identify the correct target, I would certainly see how it went for a while, before I did anything to change my vision.

While this article is for pistols, I think it applies to rifles as well:
http://www.pilkguns.com/c16.shtml

If you cannot see the target enough to aim at it, you need visual correction.
If the target looks like a fuzzy light grey blob, it is not good enough to aim at.

I had to get a set of glasses made for me, because I could not focus on the front sight of my AP. Following the article my eye doc and I tinkered with the prescription until I could see the front sight SHARP and also see the target NOT in focus but just well enough to aim at it.

Thanks Gary,

I'm also experimenting with shooting left vs right, and one vs two eyes. This is for 10m air rifle specifically. Is there any accepted method as far as one vs two eyes for rifle goes?

Well I shoot AR with both eyes open, but the non aiming eye has a sight block so it cannot see forward. Keeping both eyes open helps me keep my balance and it is easier to not have to hold one eye shut.

I shoot RH and have right eye dominant, so it is easier for me.
You just have to work out what works best for you to shoot LH with dominate left eye aiming or RH with the non dominate right eye aiming.
Maybe some who have cross dominate eye experience can chime in.

The proper place to focus with a rifle is at +0.50 diopter added to your distance vision. So if your right eye is a -1.00, You add +0.50 to arrive at a -0.50 as the ideal lens.

Without glasses your eye is a +1.0, which puts your focus close to the front sight, giving you a great sight, but a poor target. With glasses, you vision is corrected to a 0.00, which is a great target, but poor sight.

In addition, you want to use a small rear aperture, which will improve your depth of field, improving focus on both target and sight at the same time.

Art Neergaard
ShootingSight LLC

While some of this stuff applies to both rifle and pistol, they can also be different animals: My comments pertain mostly to air rifle.

For many years the mantra was shoot with the dominant eye. Based on that and your comments about being left eye dominant that would be a recommended place to start. I will also say that in recent years people have not been quite so hard over on the mantra about shooting the dominant eye regardless of the dominant hand, so starting lefty is a thought not a firm recommendation.

It is important you keep both eyes open for two reasons: First holding one eye closed requires conscious muscle effort and precision shooting is all about minimizing muscle effort. Next, your eyes are coupled together and if you close one eye this will cause the pupil on the other eye to dilate to a modest degree, this reduces the natural depth of field making apparent level of focus at a range of distances even worse. Your best bet is to use a blinder of translucent plastic such as a milk jug to blur everything out but let the ambient light through. If you are already wearing glasses Scotch Tape on the lens of the non shooting eye is a great way to experiment with this. If you really get into the game I cannot recommend strongly enough purpose made shooting glasses with the adjustable frames.

As noted, the ideal correction for shooting is modestly near sighted. ShootingSight does make the sound like it can be simply reduced to a formula, do the math order the lens and you are done. In practice it is not that simple as everyone's eyes are a little different. As noted, for most people prescription +0.5 is a good place to start but you will likely want to try going up to +0.75 and possibly but less likely +0.25. If you poke around you can find kits of lenses to hold in front of your existing glasses where you can see the effect of the various diopters. This can be helpful as ordering too many custom lenses can get pricey.

I also assume any astigmatism has been corrected. (Typically referred to a "cylinder" on your prescription.)

Proper use of the rear iris will also help. Do not just automatically close it down to increase depth of field. If you get things too dark you won't hit anything either.

Cheers,
'Dude

I’m 24 years old too and have nearly the same problem with nearly the same values due to a corneal irregularity. (I only wearing prescription lenses when watching TV in HD or driving at bad weather conditions)
I see the front sights very good, the rear sights are not that sharp and the bull is very blurry.

I thought it will be better to use a visual correction, but this didn’t help that much.
Then I bought a iris and – wow, everything is just awesome sharp, rear sight, front sight AND the target.
That’s it – I thought… but my results have gone from bad to worse and I couldn’t tell from my feeling where I’ve hit..

Now I’m shooting without glasses and iris, only have one eye covered with a translucent cover at my Champion Shooting Frame.
My results are now back to normal (I lost ~17 points in average!), I see everything blurry, except the front sights, but it’s ok.

And one hint from me - you shouldn't look at the target to see where you've hit. Stay with your eyes in a 1m radius, this will protect your eyes from tireing.

A treasure trove of articles on vision and shooting:

http://www.starreloaders.com/edhall/nwongarts.html

Mostly geared towards pistol, but the more rifle I shoot, the more I'm convinced that we're seeing the same things, but just describe them differently.

Neon21 wrote:I’m 24 years old too and have nearly the same problem with nearly the same values due to a corneal irregularity. (I only wearing prescription lenses when watching TV in HD or driving at bad weather conditions)
I see the front sights very good, the rear sights are not that sharp and the bull is very blurry.

I thought it will be better to use a visual correction, but this didn’t help that much.
Then I bought a iris and – wow, everything is just awesome sharp, rear sight, front sight AND the target.
That’s it – I thought… but my results have gone from bad to worse and I couldn’t tell from my feeling where I’ve hit..

Now I’m shooting without glasses and iris, only have one eye covered with a translucent cover at my Champion Shooting Frame.
My results are now back to normal (I lost ~17 points in average!), I see everything blurry, except the front sights, but it’s ok.

And one hint from me - you shouldn't look at the target to see where you've hit. Stay with your eyes in a 1m radius, this will protect your eyes from tireing.

Great post and observations. People think that intuitively all things in focus is great, but as you found out that is far from the truth. Your eye flicks from all three objects and trying to focus on the rear sight is hard to do and tiring.

I would though suggest you need to look at the target to see where you've hit, just use a scope or retrieve the target to a point where you can see the shot hole. Of course in 10M rifle, you only shoot 1 shot per diagram anyway so you will always be retrieving the target after each shot to replace or rotate the card.

Rob.

Thank you all very much for the help. I'll keep this thread updated as I continue down the path of eye-sorting.

Neon21, do you have cross dominance as well?

I just got my CMP 853 in the mail today, with the aperture sight. I'm finding that my eyes work very well with this style of sight. From a bench I shot a 39 on four 10m air rifle targets at 25 feet. (The 'range' is a bit short!)

I think it's time to focus (har har) on other parts of my shooting, namely everything. :)

taiden wrote:Neon21, do you have cross dominance as well?

never thought about this.
I don't know which eye has the better values - next week I'll have an appointment with my ophthalmologist (what a word..), then I will see if I have a cross dominance.
Until know I just shoot right hand / right eye because it's common..