Indeed, DJ! Just to expand on one of your thoughts... it's not just having the ime (or good sense) to set aside time everyday (or however often) to work on specific problems, it is the wisdom (or good sense) to know: what problems to work; the criteria for great, good, and good-enuf; how to work the problem in the most effective way; and when one should move on to working the next specific problem.Originally Posted by N Dhananjay
What happens to EVERYONE after about 40 is loss of the ability to accomodate. Small muscles in your eye automatically adjust the shape of a structure called the lens and that allows you to focus anywhere from infinity to ten inches or less. With age, the lens becomes less flexible and you gradually lose your ability to focus. This is called presybyopia. The nearest point at which you can focus gradually moves further out, and when it gets so far away that you can't read or even look at things at arms length, you need corrective lenses. But this has no effect on distance vision. Even with complete loss of accomodation, the hyperfocal distance for your eye in normal lighting is close enough that everything from from several feet to infinity will be in focus.
Presybyopia, by itself, should have no effect on viewing a typical photographic scene, all of which is going to be at least several feet away. Of course, you would have problems with looking at a ground glass or camera controls without corrective lenses. Typically people get bifocals or similar lenses which allow both distance vision and close vision by changing which part of the glasses' lenses you look through. This becomes second nature pretty quickly. For people with no other problems, the part of the lens for distance vision would have no correction and the part for near vision would vary from 1.25 to 2.5 diopters. If something happened to the work of some photographers when they reached 40, it wasn't because of presybyopia.
Of course, other things can also go wrong with the eye at any age. You may become nearsighted (myopia) or far sighted (hyperopia). That means, with your eye relaxed for normal distance vision, the image is formed either in front (for myopia) or in back (for hyperopia). The inability to focus simultaneously on vertical and horizontal lines is called astigmatism. All of this can be corrected by appropriate external lenses, either glasses or contact lenses. These days many people have laser surgery to correct vision by changing the shape of the cornea. Either way, there is no significant degradation of vision which would affect photography. Even if the correction is not perfect, you will be able to see more than well enough when evaluating a scene so that you can make technical and aestheitc judgements. The only significant change for a view camera user is that you will have to use bifocals or the equivalent to manipulate controls and to see the gg.
There are of course other things that can happen. In some people, the lens also gets clouded by so-called cataracts. Cataracts can seriously degrade vision and corrective lenses won't help. I more or less gave up serious photography for several years in part because of cataracts. But these days, an opthamologist in a pretty routine operations can remove the clouded lens and replace it by a plastic lens. That lens will generally be chosen to correct other problems like myopia. In my case, before cataract surgery, everything beyond a few inches from my eyes was out of focus because of high myopia. After surgery, I have close to normal vision without glasses. I haven't seen that well since I was 10. My only problem was getting used to using reading glasses or bifocals for close vision. Before the surgery, my normal 'infinity' point was so close that I could see close-up simply by taking off my glasses. Now I am in the same situation as someone with normal vision who has lost his/her accomodation.
Myopia results, it is thought, from a stretching of the eyeball, and people, like me, with high myopia show degenerative changes in the retina. Also, anyone in old age may develop what is called macular degeneration, which can lead to severe loss of clear vision. Also, in some cases, floaters , which are usually just an annoyance, can cause problems. At age 73, I have lots of floaters and while I have show no evidence of macular degeneration, because of myopia, my retina is not the same as it was when I was 40. Still, I find that I don't have any troubles with normal photography because of vision. I find that even something like seeing fine detail in a scene is more dependent on knowing what to look for. Because of years of experience looking at things photographically, I can often see things that much younger poeple with normal vision miss. I certainly have a lot of 'vision' problems but these involve my aesthetic judgement, not the physical vision provided by my eyes.
Narrowing of visual angle?
I don't understand John's remark about narrowing of visual angle. You actually only see clearly with a small part of the retina called the macula. The rest of the retina just provides peripheral vision. When you look at a scene, your eye scans it so different parts of the scene fall on the macula. The image of the scene as a whole is something that is formed in your brain as a pattern of excited neurons.
It is possible that wearing glasses might affect your effective visual angle, particularly if you have high myopiia. In that case, you might find that you see clearly only when looking through a small part of the lens, and that could conceivably affect how your eye scans the scene. But I wore +8 diopter lenses for years and never noticed any such effect. Presybyopia might conceivably affect how close you put your eye to the gg or to a print you were viewing. If you were used to viewing images from a few inches and you no longer can do that, there might be some effect. But that sounds rather doubtful to me.
If you find you tend to use longer focal length lenses, I suspect it is for reasons having nothing to do with the optics of vision formation in your eye.
Your actual field of sharp vision is less than 1/2 a degree.
Take two matches and stand them up 1/4 of an inch apart, now stand back 5 feet and try to focus on both matches at once. You'll find you can't - your eye will track from one match to the other but you will not be able to see them both as being sharp at the same time. One of them will be in unsharp peripheral vision.
My switch to dime store readers came at 50. Having always been involved with 4X5 I didn't have a problem with focus or lens settings. Gradually I moved up the scale with more magnification into the 2's. By accident I discovered by reversing and looking thru the front of the lenses (holding the glasses 2-4" from my eye) I could see the entire ground glass and with clarity from corner to corner. This works well for me and has been the start of several pleasant conversations with those observers interested in my process.
Dan,
I suspect that reversing the lenses had little to do with it. It was probably holding the lenses further from your eye that did it. You could probably accomplish the same thing by geting a large magnifier of low magnification and holding it at the proper distance from the gg. I tried that for a while, but I eventually got a prescription for high diopter reading glasses which allow me to get within 7 inches of the gg. I can see the entire frame with both eyes and focus well enough for most purposes without a loupe.
Pity, it would have been nice to get some sort of compensation. I have only started really taking lots of notice as my father had glaucoma (not to mention his cataracts), and if it is in the family you are at higher risk. Perhaps I should start a post about my dyslexia and photography. Leonard thanks for the in depth descriptions, as usual you explain it well, and better than the optician did. My understanding of presybyopia was that the lens hardened with age, which leads to the lack of ability to change shape.
As to the ten year thing... I started photography in my early teenage years, and was using a manual SLR at 15, printing at home... studied photography at art school for three years straight. So there was my first ten years of practice... Then twenty years latter I am still learning, still improving, and still making mistakes. I think it would be dangerous to put time specifications on it....
Len Metcalf
Leonard Murray Metcalf BA Dip Ed MEd
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Hi All I am new to LF as well as this forum. I thought I would chime in on this topic. I am an optometrist in SC. And it was very interesting to read your comments and responses on this subject. Leonard pretty much nailed it with his description of refractive errors, with the exception that it is presbyopia not presybyopia. Leonard, It sounds like you had great success with cataract surgery. I have this discussion many time a day and what I like to tell patients is that this loss of accommodation (ability to focus images at near) is a process that starts when you are a child and gradually progresses throughout your adult life. your near point of accommodation hits arms length at about 40, that’s why you start noticing symptoms. So let me be clear your eyes do not degenerate at 40, you are simply noticing a process that has been going on for years. Reading glasses, BF, and other near corrections are not magnifiers, they are simply moving your near point back up to a comfortable range (replacing the optical power your natural lens is losing) Unfortunately there are no great surgeries for presbyopia. LASIK cannot correct this problem. There are handful of multifocal IOLS (intraocular lenses) and accommodation IOLs but they have significant side effects or poor results, we don't often recommend them to our patients.
Many patients like "monovision" a process where we correct your dominant eye for distance with a contact lens and you non- dominant eye for near with a contact lens.
This is the principle behind most of the corrective surgeries for near vision.
Well I will stop my rambling, just thought I would chime in
Richard
Does not the "famousness" of one's art come from the critics' and/or casual observers' viewpoint ("beauty is in the eye of the beholder")? Perhaps there's a denial of a presbyopia pandemic amongst those that are the self proclaimed keepers (and definers) of famous art. I was once asked by a reviewer of some of my photographs if I spotted my prints (I didn't on these). She was wearing cheaters. I now wear them.
I thought I would chime in too; I am an ophthalmologist. I agree with the previous posts that stated that it is more likely that the photographers over 40 were doing better work simply because they had reached the the point in there life where they had refined their craft, and not due to any change in their eyesight. Another curiosity of the visual system is that many older famous painters in the past would start to paint with much more vivid colors with age, probably due to the natural clouding of the lens, or cataract formation. Many well know painters were found to follow this trend in fact.
I think that most people become much more accomplished after 40, because life goes through phases; the wandering teenage years, then the college years, followed by early career, and raising little ones throught the diaper years. In all of this you have to obtain the expertise to photograph, and also learn about and aquire equipment, etc, etc.
I am currently in the chasing kids around phase for the past few years, and can tell you that large format photography definitely gets put on hold for a while. I wonder how Ansel or E.W. still managed to do it while raising many children...
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