Lens hood
- This topic has 6 replies, 7 voices, and was last updated Apr 12, 2007 at 12:10 am by
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Ok whats the scoop with these.
To each their own. I don’t use them.
A trained eye can spot flare and loss of contrast when the sun strikes the front element of the lens. When this happens, I (or someone with me) will shade the sun with a hat or flag it with a portable reflector/diffuser I carry with me. Lens hoods are cumbersome, get in the way of my filter system, and are extremely poor at reducing and/or eliminating flare, glare, or contrast loss anyway. Learn to spot it yourself – don’t solely rely on a lens hood to eliminate it because it happens to be on your lens.
I use them on a couple of my telephotos, but not that often on my wider lenses. On my tamron 17-35, it is wide enough that it probably only blocks light for about 10 deg on each side from the 180 deg available to the front of the lens (does that make sense?). A well places hat, hand, or anything handy will work alot better in some of situations, and a hand is always with you! I heard a local guy say that the nikon film school teaches that using lens hoods is the easiest way of improving the quality of your photos. Use them or not, you still need to learn to spot flare in your photos in the viewfinder.
Eric
I almost always use them for both protection and lens flare.
But…a couple weekends ago I was trying to get some pics of the redbuds. I was struggling to find a good shot, and was trying a bunch of different stuff including filters. I took off the lens hood to make changing the filters easier. I finally found a spot I liked and took a shot. I was pretty close to 90 degrees to the sun, so I left the hood off. When I got home, I noticed a pretty nasty flare on one side of the shot that basically ruined the best one of the day.
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