Remembering Bill McRae, the godfather of modern sports optics

I am still working on the content of this summer’s Outdoor Life optics test. For this I have used volunteer testers to evaluate 45 rifle scopes, 17 binoculars, eight spotting scopes and 23 thermal imaging and sighting devices.

It’s a huge undertaking, exposing the benefits — and often the glaring shortcomings — of the year’s new optics. And while we’ve added different methodologies over the years as optics have evolved, the bones of Outdoor living’The tests are the same ones Bill McRae developed more than 30 years ago.

We still calculate the precise resolution of each optic, and we still subject each entry to our low-light test, which measures how well an optic transmits light and analyzes detail as night falls. That’s a critical consideration for hunters, because the time when you need a good optic the most isn’t the middle of the day, when all optics perform well enough. It’s when the light starts to fade and animals start to move. The optics industry has historically hated our test because it reveals performance shortcomings that often fly in the face of brands’ hyperbolic (and sometimes misleading) marketing campaigns.

McRae developed his test as a true measure of optical performance. He relied not on laboratory light transmission devices or digital spectrometers, but on hunters and shooters. We learned, under McRae’s guidance, that a mushy scope dial is a telltale sign of a bad erector system that is likely to track inaccurately and be prone to malfunction. A binocular that exhibits flare and edge distortion, he explained, will also give you a headache after a long viewing session.

McRae taught me how, by simply shining a penlight into the objective lens of an optic, I could spot dust, fingerprints, and tool marks—evidence of poor construction that created what he called “NIFL,” or non-imaging light. It was a Bill-ism for the stray light flashes that reduce optical clarity and degrade the performance of a spotting scope, binocular, or riflescope. His little penlight test has, over the decades, confirmed an optics truism: Roughly made optics generally perform poorly.

Bill McRae died last week in his beloved Montana, ending a run as one of the originals of the golden age of outdoor writing and wildlife photography. He was 89, and although he had stopped contributing articles to Outdoor living and other publications a full decade ago, McRae remained listed on OL’s colophon as Optics Editor Emeritus, a title that honored his role as the godfather of optical testing.

Long before I met Bill, and decades before he refined his optics-testing methodologies, he had established his reputation as a top-notch outdoor writer. It was an unlikely career for the Wisconsin native who came west to work on large-scale construction projects—he was a union ironworker by trade—and stayed to marry, raise a family, and learn the art and science of nature photography. His stunning photographs introduced him to magazine editors, who encouraged his writing. At the height of his second career, he contributed dozens of feature-length stories to Outdoor living and other publications.

Bill’s love of photography and his ability to transform light and landscape into images led him to sports optics. He once told me that he became an optics expert largely because no one else at the time was writing about how scope erector systems worked or educating readers about the importance of light transmission and parallax.

Bill understood the complex physics of optics, but it was his understanding of how optics are used by hunters and shooters in the dusty, violent real world, rather than in a temperature-controlled laboratory, that endeared him to readers and made him a valuable resource for optics designers.

I met Bill in 2006, the first year I started Outdoor living crew as an optics tester. That was at the Tejon Ranch in California. The following year we took the optics test to Bill’s house in Choteau, Montana, and later combined Outdoor living‘s weapons test with the optical test, where the massive tests were moved to different locations across the country.

With each iteration, I realized over time that Bill was preparing me to take on his role as optics test captain. He was a patient teacher, generous with his vast knowledge, and, along with his wife Mary, a welcoming host to a generation Outdoor living editors and volunteer opticians. In the basement of his home—the sprawling room we came to call the Optics Bunker—Bill maintained a rudimentary but highly capable optics testing lab. Here was his collimator, a lighted tube with a crosshair for measuring the precise reticle travel, turret range, and zero return of riflescopes. There was his resolution scope, with a vintage Air Force bombardier target, for measuring the vanishingly small details that the best optics can discern. In Bill’s lab, rubber bands were used to attach thousand-dollar binoculars to tripods and to attach riflescopes to dummy rifle stocks.

From that home-grown lab, Bill influenced the entire sports optics industry. Bill’s real-world testing methodology uncovered major design and performance flaws and helped launch brands by designing and testing prototypes. He helped optical pioneer Bushnell transition to Bausch + Lomb and then back to Bushnell. McRae introduced Czech optics company Meopta to American hunters and shooters. He helped Cabela’s develop its line of premium optics and elevated numerous brands with an honest review in Outdoor living.

Even when he stepped away from regularly testing optics, Bill would always ask me what I was seeing, which brands were producing quality products and which were falling behind. But he really cared about people, and he also asked about the product managers he stopped emailing and the marketers in the optics industry who stopped calling for coverage. And he asked about me, my family, and my life far beyond our shared calling.

Little by little I saw the light in his piercing hawk eyes fade. He lost his beloved Mary, just as he had lost a son and a daughter earlier in his life. He told me a few years ago that he felt the world had no place for him anymore.

Bill also once told me how his life changed the first time he looked through binoculars. He was a farm boy from Wisconsin with cows to milk and a mother to please, but a neighbor had brought back an old pair of leather-covered Porro prism binoculars from the war—World War I. Those smudged lenses revealed a new and exciting world to Bill McRae, who often described optics as “magical black tubes” that could astonish viewers.

Read more: The Best LPVO Scopes of 2024, Tested and Reviewed

Optics enable us to shrink distances. To see in the dark. To fire deadly shots at distances far beyond our physical capabilities. They transport us on light waves to distant mountains. They give us knowledge of things beyond the sight of mortals.

Perhaps Bill’s lasting legacy is his unique ability to make complex subjects accessible and, through optics, reveal worlds waiting to be discovered. The next time you peer through a pair of binoculars or focus the reticle on a riflescope, you can thank Bill McRae for making that product better, more affordable, more durable. And a little bit of magic.