By Professional Chris Batha
FieldandClays.com –-(Ammoland.com)- Any lover of nature will at some time have pondered and admired the gift of vision birds of prey are blessed with.
The ability to find, lock onto and maintain visual contact through to completion of strike and kill.
During a fall of hundreds of feet and thousands of feet per second. Many sports call for similar visual skills, baseball, tennis, golf and even basketball. Do you think Michael Jordan throughout his remarkable career was admiring his grasp on the ball or visually concentrating on the hoop?
Shooting a moving object is no different, it is visual contact with the target that coordinates our reactions to its flight and path, exactly the same as An Osprey fishing or Kevin Schwire Striking a home run.
To some extent, we are all blessed with a certain amount of eye/hand coordination. I firmly believe that like great athletes great shots have a sharper visual acuity than the rest of the herd. However, we mere mortals should not despair. The ability to focus sharply can be learned and mastered. It will require some practice on your part but the rewards with improved performance and kill ratio well worth any efforts involved.
Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty, we are all guilty of looking without seeing. In our normal day-to-day life we take in an overall picture, with no real object in mind. This phenomenon is simply because intensive focusing is extremely hard work and like any muscular activity our body is pre-conditioned not to do it. If I asked you to thread cotton through needles all day you would soon give up this job through migraines and headaches. Concentrated vision is hard and uncomfortable to maintain. Trust me look up now from this text and single out a point on the opposite side of the room, the center of a clock the corner of a picture frame. Really zero in on it, keep a pinpoint hold on it, see you have already relaxed your vision, it was extremely uncomfortable to do, so you quit.
This is what happens when trying to maintain visual contact with a moving target be it a skeet bird or mallard.
The eye is like any other muscle of the body and can be exercised in the same way, with a few simple exercises each day you can build up its ability to concentrate sharply and with a fine focus on a moving target, in the same way as say your biceps.
Take a blaze (Orange) clay target with a felt tip pen place a dot on one edge. Keep it handy on your desk or worktop. Whenever possible take a minute out to look at the clay, then really concentrate on the dot. At first, you will be unable to sustain this visual concentration for long but with diligent practice, your ability will increase to the extent that if asked to concentrate on a specific number on a clock, say 4 you would be unable to tell the time if asked to, because of your focused vision.
When this point of visual concentration is reached you then need to introduce it to your shooting. Tips to help are on sunny days black clays will reflect light this will appear as white dots on the clay, if you use your new visual concentration on these spots, watch those balls of smoke. If the sun is not out try to read the maker’s brand mark If not the rings or dimples on the shoulders of the target. With wing shooting concentrate on the eye of the bird if too distant the head or neck ring you should never be looking at the whole body! With geese and bigger birds treat the head as a separate bird say a snipe.
There is a phenomenon called physiological diplopia which causes us to see a double image opposite the point of focus, if we do not learn to concentrate on the target to the point of shutting out everything else we will always be vulnerable to seeing double and the inevitable result will be a miss.
If you see this, you might be cross-firing because your dominant eye is not over the rib. You can improve your scores by using Magic Eye Dots which will shift your sight view to over the rib.
It is estimated that 40% of right-handed shooters are left-eyed dominant while 80% of left-handed shooters are right-eyed dominant.
A problem for many shooters is wrong eye dominance and crossover sighting. This often occurs when right-handed shooters have a dominant left eye and a left-handed shooter has a dominant right eye. Many prefer to shoot giving their preferred eye an advantage and find this system to be the answer.
Made of new space-age materials, these dots allow precise placement and can be removed easily and repositioned. Clean removal leaves no residue.
With a little practice and some help from Magic Eye Dots you to can maintain your ability to find, lock on too and maintain visual contact through to completion of strike and kill.
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FieldandClays.com; is dedicated to furthering knowledge and the positive enhancement of the shooting sports. FieldandClays.com is the magazine promoting family-sporting fun with a gun. Trap, Skeet, Clays, and Hunting. It is a publication devoted to the shooting sports, by shooters. The staff members are active participants and competitors experienced in the shooting industry, publish the magazine. Visit: www.FieldandClays.com
