A lens hood is a plastic accent that comes with the whole lot from the most cost effective package lens to the most costly skilled lenses.
It’s a easy machine that’s cylindrical and attaches to the entrance of your lens – normally by way of a screw thread.
Regardless of their fundamental type, they serve a necessary a part of the pictures course of.
What’s extra, there’s a variety of third-party and aftermarket lens hoods that are available in all sizes and shapes.
Some photographers can’t depart residence with out their lens hoods, and others flip their noses up at these easy digital camera equipment – let’s uncover why.
What Does a Digital camera Lens Hood Do?
The primary motive for utilizing a digital camera lens hood is to scale back the quantity of sunshine coming into your digital camera’s lens. This lets you management lens flare and keep readability and distinction in your photos, even on vibrant days.
Lens hoods may assist to guard your lenses from harm.
Listed here are 5 causes for utilizing a lens hood with virtually each lens you personal:
1. Block daylight and keep away from lens flare
An excessive amount of daylight – particularly direct daylight, comparable to within the picture above – can have a detrimental affect in your photos.
Think about being out on a sunny day, and the solar’s angle makes your eyes squint. Instinctively, you maintain your hand as much as defend towards the harshness of that gentle. A lens hood works in exactly the identical method.
Contained in the lens, there are as much as twenty glass parts all grouped and aligned to attain focus, zoom and picture readability, and to scale back aberrations and distortions.
Lenses additionally management the path of sunshine travelling to the picture sensor.
Daylight hitting the lens immediately or at an angle impacts your picture with lens flare – vibrant spots and streaks in your picture.
The sunshine coming in at sharp angles from the facet of the lens is a giant downside as these waves will bounce round inside it, very like the impact of gentle leaks.
Clearly, daylight isn’t the one gentle supply {that a} digital camera lens hood may also help block – maybe you’re taking pictures beneath vibrant road lamps, or possibly it’s the strobes in a studio setting – regardless of the case, a hood might be the reply to undesirable glare.
2. Forestall harm to the lens glass
Most varieties of digital camera lenses are costly – a number of the finest ones can price tens of 1000’s of {dollars}. Regardless of being a professional and figuring out what you’re doing, there’s all the time a danger of unintentional harm to the lens aspect or lens face.
I’ve bumped the entrance of my lens a number of instances when out on a shoot. It’s particularly simple to do when the digital camera is slung over your shoulder on a digital camera strap or hanging in entrance of you.
For those who harm that entrance glass aspect of your lens, you would possibly as nicely change the entire lens or ship it off for restore.
Becoming a digital camera lens hood supplies a further layer of safety and insurance coverage. Consider it as a bumper bar on a automobile – the bumper will take a knock in a parking lot, however the remainder of the automobile might be high quality.
You possibly can stay with a couple of marks in your lens hood, however you may’t stay with a broken lens.
3. Defend lens from the weather
Some lenses have climate sealing permitting you to make use of them when it’s raining, snowing or in dusty circumstances.
Being out on a wildlife tour with a weather-sealed digital camera and telephoto lens all however ensures a shocking shot of a snow leopard. However all that dear gear is nugatory when the entrance of your lens is caked in snow and ice.
The only technique to handle that is with digital camera lens hoods. They supply a pure overhang that’s normally deep sufficient to defend your lens from the weather.
4. Keep away from smudges in your lenses
We’ve all had the difficulty of discovering fingerprints on the entrance glass of our lenses.
More often than not they’ll be our personal, as we frequently attain for a lens solely to find the lens cap is lacking and we’ve simply smudged our fingers throughout it.
Whereas lenses are being handled with all types of good coatings to maintain the entrance aspect clear, you may’t defeat the sticky finger.
A easy technique to handle that is with a lens hood. Very similar to the earlier two factors, the hood grants a layer of safety from fingerprints and another floor that may depart an oily smudge.
5. Enhance distinction and readability
Whereas some might say {that a} digital camera lens hood does little for picture high quality, the fact is it might probably make all of the distinction.
In a picture, a flare hitting the lens on the proper angle can significantly wash out all of the element and distinction obtainable. Colors can develop into severely light and muted, turning what can be a punchy picture into one which’s unusable.
It’s like driving your automobile on a sunny day, and the sunshine is shining in your eyes. You see a small quantity of element, sufficient to drive safely, however the readability is gone, and the glare is intense.
With a lens hood, the stray gentle that assaults the entrance aspect of the lens and causes the flare disappears.
What’s extra, your photos will profit significantly as the sunshine is held at bay to enable for distinction and readability to be evident, comparable to within the picture above.
- Is a Lens Hood essential for 50mm?
It will depend on the kind of 50mm lens, and what you are attempting to stop by utilizing a hood. Some 50mm lenses have a entrance lens aspect that’s recessed so there’s no want to guard it with a hood.
Nevertheless, for those who’re utilizing a hood to stop undesirable gentle from affecting your image, then sure, lens hoods are essential for 50mm and different focal size lenses too.
Do Lens Hoods Actually Work? 6 Photographs With and With out a Digital camera Lens Hood
Listed here are some lens hood earlier than and after pictures so you may see precisely what they do to a photograph.
Learn how to Put On a Lens Hood
To connect a lens hood to your digital camera lens, merely line up the grooves contained in the hood with these on the entrance of your lens, and twist till it clicks into place.
When not in use, you may flip the hood round and mount it in reverse on the lens to avoid wasting house – that is helpful when packing your digital camera in a bag.
What are the Completely different Sorts of Lens Hoods?
Left: Petal Lens Hood. Proper: Cylindrical Lens Hood.
There are a couple of various kinds of digital camera lens hoods, together with these provided by the lens producer within the field and people you should purchase individually for prime and zoom lenses.
- Cylindrical (Spherical) Lens Hoods
A cylindrical lens hood will normally have a diameter that’s solely barely wider than the widest a part of the lens – in addition they have a straight entrance edge.
That method, you may mount the lens backwards when not in use and it’ll keep comfortable towards the lens barrel. Lenses with an extended focal distance (35-90mm) or longer telephoto lenses will normally have a cylindrical lens hood.
These lenses have a compressed subject of view, so that you gained’t see the ideas of the hood in your picture.
Some lenses can have a petal-shaped lens hood – in any other case often called tulip-shaped. These have 4 curved petal-shaped edges and when mounted are longer on the prime, backside and two sides.
The design of those hoods permits optimum gentle whereas avoiding flare. You’d use this kind of hood with a wide-angle lens – a few of them have a significantly wider diameter than the entrance aspect to stop the perimeters of the hood from showing in photos.
For those who’re evaluating a tulip lens hood vs spherical, it will depend on your wants – a tulip hood is healthier for wide-angle lenses. They’re additionally designed to dam extra gentle from the 4 corners of a picture, making them marginally simpler than a spherical hood.
Why use a sq. lens hood? To dam extra ambient gentle. Sq. or rectangular hoods intention to duplicate the form of your digital camera sensor, and in doing so, block any stray gentle from coming into it. Sq. hoods even have a retro attraction to them, so that you’ll typically see them on Leicas or Fujifilm cameras.
A bayonet lens hood is a time period used interchangeably for all sorts of lens hood, however normally refer
Why use a rubber lens hood? Rubber lens hoods function collapsible segments so you may simply retailer them. They may also be stretched across the entrance lens aspect, that means you need to use one hood for your entire lenses.
Some aftermarket first-party lens hoods could be a premium product created from alloy or metallic to enhance a particular lens.
Fujifilm gives a number of metallic lens hoods that mount with a spherical thread however have an oblong type – harking back to a videography lens.
- Are digital camera hoods common?
Basically, digital camera hoods should not common – you can not screw a hood from a Canon digital camera onto your Sony lens, for instance. Nevertheless, there are specific third-party producers who supply common hoods that are normally manufactured from rubber, to adapt to the completely different lens diameters.
What sort of lens hood is finest?
The lens hood that comes along with your lens is normally the best choice as deemed by the lens producer.
For those who’re buying a third-party lens hood, rubber choices help you use them on lenses of various diameters, that means you may typically personal only one and use it with all of your lenses.
As for the form when shopping for spare lens hoods, a cylindrical or a petal form will get the job performed.
When to Use a Digital camera Lens Hood to Enhance Your Pictures
The brief reply is that it is best to use a hood once you need to keep away from lens flare or defend your digital camera lens.
Listed here are some regularly requested questions concerning utilizing hoods in pictures:
- Ought to I exploit a Lens Hood on a Cloudy Day?
No, there’s actually no level to make use of a lens hood on a cloudy day since there gained’t be a lot stray gentle coming into your lens. Utilizing a hood when it’s cloudy may very well scale back the ambient gentle your digital camera sees, forcing you to make use of a slower shutter velocity or greater ISO, which may have hostile penalties in your picture.
- Ought to I exploit a lens hood with a flash?
Basically, you shouldn’t use a hood with a flash since it might probably stop the flash from correctly exposing the decrease portion of your photograph. That is particularly the case when utilizing a wide-angle lens or an extended hood.
- Can you utilize a lens hood and filter on the identical time?
Sure, you need to use each on the identical time. The diameter of the outer fringe of the lens filter shouldn’t be in the way in which once you repair or take away the hood. Nevertheless, numerous lenses solely have one level of attachment, so it’s both the filter or the hood, however not each.
- Do you utilize a lens hood indoors?
Until you’re attempting to defend from overhead lighting, there’s no actual want to make use of a lens hood indoors because it gained’t affect picture high quality both method. That stated, you would possibly preserve one on whereas indoors simply to assist defend your lens from harm.
- Do I would like a lens hood if I’ve an ND filter?
It’s typically not advisable to make use of a hood with an ND filter, for the reason that hood might trigger gentle to enter your lens off-angle, which can adversely have an effect on the light-filtering properties of the ND filter.
- Do lens hoods trigger vignetting?
For those who follow the hood that comes along with your lens, you shouldn’t discover any vignetting. Nevertheless, for those who use an ill-fitting third-party lens hood or connect a petal-shaped hood incorrectly, you may even see the perimeters of the hood in your body, which is able to seem as vignetting within the closing picture.
- Ought to I exploit a lens hood at evening?
Whereas not important, digital camera lens hoods might be helpful at evening for blocking undesirable synthetic gentle from inflicting lens flare in your photos.
- Does a lens hood have an effect on publicity?
Sure, a lens hood impacts publicity by stopping undesirable gentle from overexposing parts of your picture.
- How ought to I transport/retailer my lens hoods?
As a result of form and materials of lens hoods, they simply crush if squished right into a digital camera bag. One technique to minimise danger and save house is to move them connected to your lens within the reverse place.
How do I select a lens hood?
The video above provides some good ideas when selecting a lens hood.
- How do you measure for a lens hood?
The best method is to measure the diameter of your lens filter thread. Nevertheless, if you wish to calculate the place within the periphery a lens hood would develop into seen, right here’s the formulation courtesy of Picture.Stackexchange:
AoV=2*arctan(d/2f)
AoV is the Angle of View
d is the dimensions of the sensor/movie within the path measured
f is the focal size (in the identical models as d)
For a round hood, you’ll use the diagonal measure of the sensor/movie
For a petal or tulip hood you would want to calculate primarily based on the width and peak in addition to the diagonal of the sensor/movie.
- Do You Actually Want a Lens Hood?
Typically, sure – many photographers use digital camera lens hoods to keep away from lens flare and defend their lenses.
- Why I don’t use a lens hood
The place a lens hood blocks extreme gentle and prevents extreme lens flares from ruining a picture, the alternative might be fairly interesting.
Including just a little flare to your picture can flip a easy composition right into a extra pronounced story. Lens flare may also help to relate that it’s vibrant or scorching, for instance.
It’s simply essential to do not forget that extreme lens flare shouldn’t be your good friend and that it’s finest to take a balanced method in how typically you introduce flare to your pictures.
