Wearing Eyeglasses and Using Camera Eye Viewfinders

Depending on the survey and the country, about 2 out of 3 or 3 out of 4 people have eyeglasses, even if not used all the time.

Most adults over age 45 have presbyopia, or the inability to focus at close range. They use reading glasses.

For those with distance vision and/or astigmatism or other corrections, they wear eyeglasses or contact lenses.

Most DSLR cameras have a diopter adjustment to enable one to look through the eyepiece viewfinder with or without wearing glasses or contact lenses.

My photo hobby involves 2D, 3D and video photography at events such as historical re-enactments, air shows, and character photography at comic-con.

All of these are “fast action” scenarios – taking off and putting on glasses in between photos has not been a great option. Consequently, I have been looking at other options.

I am fortunate in that I have had good vision all my life and did not get my first reading glasses until late 40s, and first distance vision correction in mid-50s, for use while driving. My distance vision correction is small enough I am not (yet) required to wear glasses while driving, although I do wear glasses as it is more relaxing on my eyes to do so.

Glasses and Photography

When I have been photographing at air shows, I tend to keep my glasses off so I can quickly put my eye up to the camera viewfinder. More recently, due to wanting to wear sunshades over my glasses, and making it easier to spot aircraft in the sky, particularly when they fly out aways before returning to the airfield, I’ve been wearing my glasses – then removing them rapidly into a shirt pocket so I could use my camera’s eye viewfinder.

But I have found this is not practical.

  • One, its time consuming to swap glasses off to take photos.
  • Two, lenses become dirty, quickly.
  • Three, I occasionally drop my glasses when doing this maneuver. Very bad.

I have myself carrying 3 sets of glasses.

  1. Generic dark glasses
  2. Distance vision glasses with or without clip on sunshades.
  3. Reading glasses
  4. And no glasses when using the camera.

At the last air show I attended, the “clip ons” for my prescription glasses broke. Then I dropped my generic dark glasses, scratching the lenses.

Juggling 3 sets of glasses and 2 cameras has become a fiasco – and I began looking for better solutions.

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New OM-1 Camera: Thomas Stirr has the most sensible perspective I have seen

His insight is to identify the clear strategic positioning of this new camera:

OM Digital Solutions has launched their new OM-1 flagship camera and the strategic positioning of the company is now crystal clear.

Source: OM-1 Strategic Positioning – Small Sensor Photography by Thomas Stirr

On the online photo forums and groups, some are excited by the new OM-1 while others get caught up in arguing spec details and full frame this versus not full frame that. The discussions are, frankly, boring.

Thomas Stirr’s observation, though, is that this is not necessarily the camera for a studio or perhaps wedding photographer. Instead, this is a camera for those who value “speed, durability, portability and weatherproofing”.

Update on outage Jan 25-27 2022

An automatic update to WordPress 5.9 software left the blog disabled.

What happened: For unknown reasons, the update did not fully complete and was missing a critical file.

The next morning, out of the blue, the blog sent me an email update on some plugins that were updated – which meant the control panel functions had come back to life.

Because the control panel was still functional, I was able to use the “Re-install 5.9” option and let it repeat the automatic update again. This time, it ran properly, and the blog is working again. The other option would have been to do a manual install, which is time consuming.

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