Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2014/05/24
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Some of you may remember my travails with over the last three years with two cataract surgeries and several complications. One lingering issue is that while I now have good distance vision, I also have double vision when looking to the right. Several ophthalmologists have slowly converged on the problem but never completely solved it, despite many appointments and several different changes of glasses. I finally had my appointment with a doctor who specializes in this issue, which is called strabismus. To make a long story short, my eyes are slightly misaligned. I had eye muscle surgeries as a kid which pretty much fixed it for most of my life, but with age it's reappeared. The cataract surgeries changed my vision from nearsighted to normal, which made the misalignment more noticeable. The prism corrections in my glasses that the other eye docs prescribed are reasonably good, but could be improved. The verdict is that I will never be free from glasses despite now having good distance vision. I am not a candidate for surgery--the misalignment is not serious enough to be worth the risk. I have to wait another month and a half for an appointment with the "ortho" person, who will mess with more prism corrections and get it as right as they can. All this directly affects my use of Leica rangefinder cameras. Since the cataract surgeries, I've found that I can focus my M6 and M8 much more easily bare-eyed than with glasses (I think the glasses' astigmatism correction simulates some degree of diopter change). So I need to take my glasses off to best use the Ms. All of this fiddling with glasses gets in the way of using the Leica quickly to photograph people, which is one of the reasons why I use RF cameras in the first place. What's maddening is that I know I can get the viewfinder right. I can do it with the little Megaperls 1.15x magnifier, which has an adjustable diopter (unfortunately, it's not calibrated). But I can't use it for real shooting with glasses, because it has insufficient eye relief to see the full normal lens frame, and the metal eyepiece with fingernail notches (for focusing) will scratch my glasses. Leica diopters have flat metal eyepieces, and I can't try them locally, so I have no idea what the eye relief will be or if glueing felt on them would work for me. I'm not giving up--eventually I'll find out what diopter I need, and risk having to sell it if it doesn't work. The good news, of course, is that I still can see. :-) And I will continue to make images somehow. But I am really bummed out by the possibility that I might not be able to be decisive-moment Leica RF people-shooter any more. I don't want that to happen. --Peter