Well?
I don’t shoot. Yet I often read in the magazines about yellow-tinted shooting glasses. Why? How do they work? Do they enhance selected areas of the visible spectrum making it easier to spot the target? Could they be used in other non-hunting areas?
I think the main purpose is eye protection. A lot of stuff comes flying out of a semi-automatic weapon when the spent cartridge is ejected…
I think the OP’s question is about the fact that the glasses tend to be tinted. Why not just use a pair of old raquetball goggles?
In black and white photography, a yellow or yellow/orange filter boosts contrast. When shooting, the color of the intended target would be less important that crisply defining it, visually, hence colored optics to increase contrast.
They increase contrast when viewing objects on a blue (sky) background. Here is a study abstract.
Hey neat… I wonder if I could make some kind of (no doubt nerdy looking as hell) yellow or red filter for my racketball glasses?
I used to go pistol shooting with my room mate. He found it mighty amusing every time a spent casing would hit the divider in our shooting stall, bounce back, and peg me in the temple. Apparantly the geometry worked out JUST RIGHT for that to happen with a Beretta 92 all the time. This has nothing to do with anything, I just thought it was funny.
Former target shooter and wearer of yellow-tinted shooting glasses checking in.
The glasses serve two purposes:
To increase contrast. The targets are black circles on white paper. The best contrast (so I’ve been told and experience bears out) is yellow and black. Yellow glasses turn the white paper yellow, but leave the black alone. This makes the black circles very easy to see, and thus to centre in the iron sights (that is, non-telescopic) mounted on our rifles. FTR, when I was competing, I shot single-shot bolt-action .22 match rifle, using only iron sights.
Eye protection. No, the glasses will not stop a bullet shot from a gun. But they will protect against spent brass (used cartridges) ejected from a gun. At a shooting match, there is not much room on the line, and shooters lie (or stand or kneel as the match demands) quite close together. It is not unusual to eject a spent cartridge and have it land on the shooter right next to you. Having one land on his or her head is bad enough; you do not want it to bounce off something and go into the shooter’s eye. Neither, naturally, does the other shooter. Hence, the glasses.
Interesting anecdote: During one of the competitions from which the 1984 Canadian Olympic shooting team was selected (yep, I tried out), I was on the line next to a very capable young woman. Still, she had to lean over at one point and ask if I could maybe not open my gun’s action quite so vigorously. Seems my spent brass was hitting her in the head. Okay, so I took care opening my action, and we continued to shoot.
She did well. So well, in fact, that she was named to the Olympic team. And she won a gold medal in Los Angeles.
I like to think that by not distracting her with flying spent brass at the tryouts, I had a small–very small–part in her success. Of course, maybe if I had distracted her, I could have had her place on the team. I didn’t make it, but I came damn close. 
I have a orange tinted visor for my motorcycle helmet. It was developed by Shoei who make them for US fighter pilots.
On a cloudy or overcast day the contrast and visibility are amazing. I raved so much a few of my friends bought them.
Contrast has been mentioned already, but they also help with sun glare. Go find a pair of yellow tinted glasses and you’ll see what I mean.
I guess it goes without saying that it’s not a good idea to piss off someone standing next to you with a loaded gun.
And the importance of safety should also be emphasized.
Only a fool would shoot a gun without eye protection.[sup]1[/sup]
[sup]1[/sup][sub]There are some exceptions such as combat and real self defense situations. But for target shooting and hunting, the wise shooter will always wear some sort of eye protection. Even prescription glasses are 1000X better than nothing.[/sub]
Thanks to all with your responses. I was just given a pair of safety glasses and they are tinted yellow (all of my other safety glasses were clear). I plan to test these new glasses in the workshop (the garage) to see if they improve visibility.
Since the OP has been addressed, I don’t feel bad continuing this hijack:
The orange tint significantly blocks the shorter wavelength end of the spectrum, blues, and ALL of the UV. This seriously darkens the sky, but not the non-blue aircraft flying in it. This makes it significantly easier to spot air traffic…important to any pilot, but even more so to a fighter jock. As a sailplane pilot I find that “blue blockers” also bring out a lot of structure in cloud formations, and allow me to spot the earliest wisps associated with cumulus formation (and thermals).
And they seriously screw up color perception, but also increase the contrast with various sorts of folage, which can make things look a little prettier.
I suppose that’s good as long as the other planes aren’t painted blue. Of course, if someone painted their plane in a certain color speficially to avoid detection by pilots using the visors, they’d probably become easier to see by everyone not using the special visors (not to mention the color of the plane having no effect on radar detection anyways, so eh). I wonder if they market special eyewear with this kind of filter for civil pilots.
I got to talk to some Texas Air National Guard pilots about 5 years back (during the Summer of 2001, actually), and they mentioned that when doing agressor training with less experienced pilots, the agressors carry bright orange dummy missiles on the wingtips, in order to make it a bit easier on the trainee (apparantly F-16s, at least with their dull-grey paint jobs, are remarkably difficult bastards to see during a dogfight).
Also, what options are there for someone who wants to wear these special goggles or glasses, but who needs to wear prescription glasses? Do they make goggles specially designed to be worn over glasses?
Yes they do. Look for “military-issue.” Those are designed to be used over eyeglasses if necessary. There are lots of companies that make them.
Can someone suggest a source for these?
That’s not entirely true. High-intensity b&w CRT’s with a green notched contrast filter affixed to the face of the CR tube were used for many years in Air Force fighter jets. Air Force research proved that the human brain took the least amount of time in fractions of a second to glance, focus on data, absorb it and look away.
Not only were the CRT faces optically bonded with a green notched contrast filter, but the face of the green glass was coated with an anti-reflective surface that drove light to the edges of the surface of the glass, therefore further eliminating any glare or reflections that would interefere with split-second data absorption.
I’ve spent about 30 minutes Googling trying to find a cite, and won’t give up. However, I’ve been told this by a man who bought Air Force surplus CRT’s in the early 1970’s for a camera invention, and was told by folks in the military just why it was that they ordered the CRT units from Raytheon to be built to that spec.
The CRT’s were black and white, driven with an 18,000 volt tripler circuit. The bonded glass was green, with the AR coating up front. The net effect was an insanely high contrast green and black CRT.
While I agree that using a yellow filter jacks contrast through the roof when shooting B&W film ( I’ve done it plenty of times ), our eyes are not black and white, they are visible color spectrum rod and cone sensors that show us millions of shades of color.
Cartooniverse
You can have perscription glasses made with the appropriate tint, but my solution is contact lenses + sunglasses.
Try these guys.
Also there are other rare but dangerous malfunctions that could cause major eye/face injuries, especially since many serious target shooters are also reloaders. Case head failures, primer blowouts, and weak rounds can produce some impressive fragmentation and smoke/fire spitting depending on the gun in question.