Your eyesight goes bad. Your doctor says time for a choice.

[N Dhananjay]

Similar problem here - need glasses for both up close and long distance. Growing old is not for wimps....

I tried progressives and found it quite unsettling. Tried two pairs of glasses but found it a pain to keep track of the pair not on my nose and the need to keep switching them. Eventually settled on a pair of bifocals with the line set quite high and that seems to work best for me. I sometimes have to tilt my head up a bit if my set up is very high but most of the time, it feels fairly comfortable.

Cheers, DJ

[StoneNYC]

In order to drive and get there, you need distance vision, once you're there you can take the time to wear them, I say go for distance... And wear the glasses for close up work. Plus get a special focusable loupe and you can still use that for focusing without needing to throw on the glasses.

[Mark Barendt]

Similar problem here - need glasses for both up close and long distance. Growing old is not for wimps....

I tried progressives and found it quite unsettling. Tried two pairs of glasses but found it a pain to keep track of the pair not on my nose and the need to keep switching them. Eventually settled on a pair of bifocals with the line set quite high and that seems to work best for me. I sometimes have to tilt my head up a bit if my set up is very high but most of the time, it feels fairly comfortable.

Cheers, DJ

Yes line high has been the best of the bifocal setups for me too.

[Jac@stafford.net]

Take heart, Heroique, for modern optics are very good.

I have profound astigmatism which cannot be corrected to 20/20, but I cope very well with quality tri-focals. My optometrist cringes a bit when he tests me with new spectacles because half the time they have to be remade. Always have a test with the newly ordered items.

[Dan Fromm]

Heroique, I've been near-sighted since early childhood. Less so now. So I've worn glasses nearly all of my life. First, single vision. Then, bifocals. Now, trifocals. I've tried progressives, hated them and couldn't or wouldn't adjust. My big problem with them is that when I looked at anything close the shape was distorted. For example, I saw the top of a perfectly normal ordinary cup as an oval.

If I were you, I'd try trifocals. You'll have to learn to use them, though. When first put on (I went through this with my first pair of bifocals, again with my first pair of trifocals) I thought that they were impossibly awkward. I had to look at things just so. And then I caught on.

What I don't like is that the standard distance for infinity is only 20 feet. My distance vision is corrected to 20/15 but I have trouble reading far distant road signs, can't focus on them.

[gleaf]

Have been a Bifocal fellow since 1972 (age 26) Eyes could not take the constant repetitive chalkboard to table top focus change day after day all day long. Since about age 55 or so I have had to select where I want the short range to be. Desk top, PC Monitor, car dash to go with my distance prescription. Being quite short sighted I opt to have far and Monitor / arm length in focus which includes dashboard instruments while driving. For close I use the wonders of nearsightedness. I see just fine at 1 foot uncorrected. Fellows I worked with in instruments had dual flip down lens loupes that clipped to their eyeglass frames for working small and close. See what is available in adaptive optical tools before letting the eye specialist be the only and expensive salesman.

[Bruce Watson]

...I mentioned that either choice, in the context of my personal landscape work, would be equally bad: Fix distant vision, but you'd still need spectacles for set-up, focusing, movements; contrariwise, fix near vision, but you'd still need spectacles to see distant (and not-so-distant) subjects from your tripod position. Scylla or Charybdis.

Turns out that it's not really true that either choice is equally bad. At least in my research, which as you correctly point out is current.

The world we work in is set up for majority conditions. Like right-handedness. And Far-sightedness. If your eyes are correct for distance vision (like the majority of people who don't need corrections), you can buy off-the-shelf sunglasses, and off-the-shelf readers. At any drug store you can find, and a lot of other stores too (the ubiquitous chain stores). So if you leave your sunglasses somewhere, drop them, sit on them, whatever... you can easily buy something to get you through. Same with reading.

But the opposite is not true. If you are corrected for near vision, and you loose your glasses, you're out of luck. You can't drive, can't see the scenery, can't do much beyond read maps and books. Off-the-shelf sun glasses are pointless in such a case, and you'll be "down" for a week or more waiting for a new pair of prescription glasses to be made. Just sayin'.

As you age, presbyopia is inevitable. At least at our current state of medicine. This means your near vision will be constantly changing, and your eyes' ability to accommodate (move the plane of fine focus nearer) will diminish. So trying to correct your near vision is a moving target. Better to track that moving target with glasses than with surgery IMHO.

Besides, once you figure out glasses, they are pretty darn useful. You can get a special pair made for you that lets you put your eyes about 5 inches away from the groundglass (5x4) that lets you see the entire ground glass without moving your head. A dynamite way to compose, and one that people who don't wear glasses struggle with even when their eyes are young and healthy. And once you have these glasses, you can get a set of flip-down jeweler's loupes (they clip to the glasses frame) that let you view the ground glass at 6x magnification like you would with a ground-glass loupe, but hands free! Again, not something the non-glasses wearers in the group can easily get away with. And yes, this is exactly the way I've been doing LF for a decade or so, so I know it works, and works really well.

I'm just sayin' that my research to date is pointing me toward good distance vision, and correcting the rest with glasses. Of course, YMMV.

Oh, yes, one other thing. Everything I'm finding out warns me away from split correction (one eye near, one eye far). Doctors and surgeons think this is cool, but don't do this to their own peers, or their children. Talk to an optometrist about this, and you'll find that people who have this done (lasik or cataract surgery) are the ones most likely to have trouble, and correcting with glasses after the fact is messy, expensive, and time consuming. My optometrist said: "Don't go there. Just don't."

[tgtaylor]

I've been wearing glasses since my mid thirties. I remember looking down a street in Des Moines, Iowa for an approaching bus and things looked "kind of blurry" way down there. Yep, I needed glasses and have been wearing them ever since. I also need glasses for reading but decided to go the dedicated distance and reading route from day one. This means always having two pairs of glasses with you as well as a third pair for sunglasses.

For my photography this translates to using the distance pair for finding and composing out of the camera. On a sunny day I often have to make a choice of whether to wear the sunglasses or the clear or carry both with me. Photographically speaking, the clear is the preferred choice but the sunglasses are physically the more comfortable. But I can't focus on the ground glass wearing glasses so whatever I'm wearing must come off...until I put the loupe to the glass and then I need the distance glasses. With the smaller 35mm and MF cameras I went with the diopter for vision correction si I have to remove my glasses to focus with them.

I guess that I'm fortunate in that my fading eyesight has so far been a mere inconvenience and has had no other impact on doing photography. Where I really notice my aging eyesight is when I'm out under the stars with the binoculars or telescope.

Thomas

[Jim Jones]

In order to drive and get there, you need distance vision, once you're there you can take the time to wear them, I say go for distance... And wear the glasses for close up work. Plus get a special focusable loupe and you can still use that for focusing without needing to throw on the glasses.

I agree. As inexpensive as reading glasses are, one can have a few for different tasks. This is cheaper and more effective than specialty glasses. I find a loupe less tiring than trying to use bifocal vision for ground glass focusing.

[Jim Jones]

. . . Oh, yes, one other thing. Everything I'm finding out warns me away from split correction (one eye near, one eye far). Doctors and surgeons think this is cool, but don't do this to their own peers, or their children. Talk to an optometrist about this, and you'll find that people who have this done (lasik or cataract surgery) are the ones most likely to have trouble, and correcting with glasses after the fact is messy, expensive, and time consuming. My optometrist said: "Don't go there. Just don't."

In the five weeks between two cataract removals, I had one eye well corrected for distant vision, and the other that focused without glasses at maybe six inches. It worked much better than expected, although I opted for good distant vision in the second cataract surgery for many reasons, including safety when driving.