Unlike Lara Croft, I wasn’t a born marksman (or markswoman, if you like). After 100s of YouTube videos, a few training classes, and several thousand rounds downrange, I’ve made great progress with my pistol shooting. And, although I’m still making improvements on that front, where I’m completely behind is in my long range skill. To my great fortune, I recently met the firearms instructors from In Extremis Consulting Group, who offered to introduce me to some precision rifle techniques—beginning with zeroing parallax.
Body Position
To get started, Austin, former US Army sniper, and In Extremis firearms instructor, had me “tee up” on the rifle (in this case, a beautiful American Precision Arms, chambered in .308 Win, and topped with a Schmidt & Bender scope), approaching it with a squared “gun fighter” stance. I stood perpendicular to the rifle with my feet just over a shoulder-length apart, and my right shoulder lined up with the rifle’s stock. and tried to maintain the same alignment as I dropped into prone (that is, on my stomach on the ground). For a little extra stability, I spread my high tops a little more, and moved up to shoulder the rifle. With the rifle tucked into my shoulder, and my cheek weld established, I applied forward pressure on the rifle—what Austin calls “pre-loading the bipod.” To maintain stability while making minute adjustments, Austin had me use a rear bag. With that tucked under the buttstock of the rifle, I only needed to slightly alter my pressure on the bag in order to make precise adjustments to the rifle’s position. Once I established my sight picture with both the rifle and my body stably positioned, I was ready to start zeroing parallax.
Zeroing Parallax
The first component of zeroing parallax was simply to look down the scope and adjust it until my target was in focus. Next, I had to make note of the “eye box” of my scope (when using telescopic sights, one’s field of vision is limited; the window of magnified field of view through telescopic sights is called the “eye box”). When moving my head slightly from side to side, the target remained in clear focus, but the reticle appeared to shift. I continued making tiny adjustments to the focus until the scope’s reticle appeared stationary, even when looking from side to side in my field of view. Presto! Zeroing parallax complete.
With the scope parallax zeroed, I can remove the variable of not having my sight aligned *just so* within the eye box. I’m not about to head off to begin tomb raiding… but learning techniques like this puts me one step further down the road of my marksmanship journey.
Good stuff, look forward to move vids on this and watching you improve. You will need to get a long range rifle.
Well written article, well made and detailed video. It’s great to see your evolution as a shooter, Dest.
Good job Destinee! Lookin’ real good so far!
Great explanation! I think you may have a future as an instructor. Any interest in that?
Thanks Destinee for some informative writing and videos. I saw this vid earlier and it really helped me with setting up my scope for long range targets. I have just gotten a Savage 10BA in .308 and have an inexpensive but decent scope on it till I can get the Trijicon I want. All I can say is your guys friends are lucky to have a person like you around that enjoy these kind of male dominated sports. I think it kicks butt! I really appreciate the work and time you and the staff put in to this channel to make it great! I’m glad I found it; keep up the fantastic work folks!
I have something to add to this just good guideline.
To be thorough, there is another step prior to parallax adjustment: eyepiece adjustment.
The eyepiece (in your photo/video the knob is hided under the rear flip up cover) can be rotated to focus your eye on the reticle. That is its only job, you can’t use it to focus on the target or to adjust parallax.
Focusing the reticle is essential, otherwise you may find yourself with the parallax perfectly tuned, the target image perfectly on focus and the reticle out of focus. A crisp and sharp reticle is essential in long range shooting, and you also want to avoid to shift your eye focus between reticle and target, because this lead to a premature eyestrain.
The eyepiece must be regulated the first time you use the scope, and everytime you use someone else rifle/scope, expecially if you, or the rifle’s owner, wear glasses. If the eyepiece has not a regulation lock, it’s god practice to mark your setting with a permanent marker (if the scope is yours of course), or to control reticle focus every time you use it.
To correctly focus the reticle: turn the eyepiece counter-clockwise till stop. Then, point the scope (without looking through it) at the sky. At this point you can look through the scope, and you’ll see the reticle way out of focus, fuzzy. Now you can start to rotate the eyepiece clockwise, 1/2 or 1/4 turn at time, depending on how wide the regulation is, looking out of the scope and then in again every step to prevent your eye from adjusting the focus itself. When the reticle appears fully sharp and crisp, you’re good to go.
Another thing I’d like to add: in scopes where parallax adjustment is on the side knob, the regulation must always be made downward starting from the infinity end of the dial. Every time you have to change from a closer to a longer range you have to do the same. This is because of the mechanical play between the components of the parallax regulation system. In very high end scopes like S&B that may not be an issue, but in low or medium quality scopes, even in Leupold’s as far as I know, this must be taken into account. With front objective parallax adjustment scopes this is not an issue, you can turn it in either way.
Hope this will help 😉