If you have glasses and don't need bifocal or progressive. Their only a couple of things I really recommend going into an aspheric or digital aspheric lens, If your glasses aren't too strong go into trivex material. Asherpheric will help with the peripheral distortion on the lens and trivex will make it impact-resistant and have great optics and super lightweight (I was told it was developed by the military just for this reason). The anti-glare coating will help decrease the glare off of items and help with optics! These simple options will make your regular glasses optimized to become shooting/hunting glasses that you can wear around normally. Sometimes doing a transition can help but we will talk more specialized exams down below.
Going into contact with the best optics is the simple answer to shooting. When you are shooting you should be having too many problems with contact lenses if you only need a single vision if you are it means dry eyes or poor fitting contact. Sometimes going into specialty contact lenses can help eliminate those problems.
If we want to make specialized glasses/sunglasses then we need to talk about tints. No, all tints are not the same. If you want to go shoot clay pigeons then yellow/orange tints normally work best this helps accent the orange clay pigeon on a bright sunny day! Amber lenses are better for clay pigeons shooting on a cloudy day. Blue/purple lens helps orange targets pop on a green background.
When it comes to hunting glasses normally going into polarizing brown or grey helps. Polarization helps reduce glare on all horizontal surfaces and will help later on with fishing by seeing into the water. Gray maintains normal color vision and Brown accents the oranges and red. If you are color blind we can use curtain glasses to also help with color vision to help when trying to track down animals or targets.
Now I'm going to go over options if you need a bifocal or progressive. If you shoot through a scope, there is no major issue the glasses should be set for distance and the problem is solved. When it comes to shooting without a scope things get complicated. For shotguns, it is not too complicated. We set the power of your glasses to be at the top of the shotgun at the bead/sight. With a shotgun, you are not going to be shooting at 300 yards and a little bit of blur in the distance won't hurt anything it will only help you by forcing you to practice the fundamentals! For pistol/rifle shooting in mid-range, not a big deal we can do the same thing. The problem is long-range. This kinda flips everything upside down quite literally. You are going to need a good-fitting frame for this, preferably one with noise pieces. The reason why is so we can adjust how it fits on your face better to allow for the reading portion of the glasses to go to the top instead of the bottom. We set the reading portion of the glasses to the power needed to put your front sight into focus. When shooting rifles your cheek goes down and you look further up on the glasses and that will allow you to look at the sights and have the sights in focus. Then if you move your head back up going to be able to see in the distance. When shooting a pistol at a long distance you normally drop your head again and again looking at the top of the glasses and again we add the extra power to put your sight into focus for your arm length and sight length for your gun. These simple solutions can easily solve some of the most frustrating things when it comes to glasses and shooting. That being said sometimes when it comes to these things going to multifocal contact lenses can also help because they give you a range of vision. We lower the power of the add-in contact to give the best distance vision in multifocal contact lenses and still allow you to see your front sight. How most contact lens allow you to see up close isn't dependent on how the contact lens moves on your eye so it's kinda nice because you don't need to find the sweet spot.
