Viewfinder

I did my first long shoot the other day. I was shooting a baby shower for my sister in law and ended up taking about 200 shots. By the end of the night my viewfinder eye was hurting a lot to the point were my eye wouldn't focus when looking the the viewfinder anymore. Was just wondering what I was doing wrong.

Interesting. My guess is you either weren't blinking enough or you were pressing the camera against your eye too hard. Or both. Does either of those sound likely? I haven't experienced your problem but both of those seem like good possibilities and I expect either one would leave you with a sore, worn out eye.

I may have been pressing it against my eye fairly hard I find I need to to see right. I was thinking maybe I needed a longer rubber piece on the viewfinder or something as I feel I mash my face against the rear lcd a lot to focus properly. A lot of the shots were using my 50mm af which I have to focus manually with my D3000 if that makes any difference.

My first guess was pressing also.
Have you adjusted your viewfinder diopter ?

Don't know if that's why your having trouble or not

I used to find that, when using a microscope a lot, if I closed one eye the open eye would be fuzzy and irritated after some time, but was OK if I kept both open. - TF

I have to agree with Oldclicker

It is normal. This has happend to me on shoots that lasted many hours. I noticed i would blink less when I had one eye closed and have my viewfinder eye opened. Other sports shooters includeing myself have both eye's open when shoothing through the VF. The left vf eye lets me see things in the camera while my right eye tracks thing's outside the camera, that is assuming that the camera body is'nt blocking that view. The main point is it helps with eye relief as well, since you have both eye's open, it is easy to blink normally.

I tried a bit around the house this morning with my left eye in the VF and my right eye open and WOW what a difference that made. Thank you for all the good responses. I'm loving this forum more and more everyday!