All good in the Hood ?

[John Bragg]

Looking at some of my recent shots with a compact camera, I realised how much an undervalued acccessory the humble lens hood actually is. The camera in question does not have such a luxury and some of the shots have obvious flare and veiling. It does not destroy the shot, but it is there nonetheless. It made me realise how important a good lens hood really is in the quality of the image recorded on film. Even an uncoated lens can perform well even shooting near the Sun with the addition of a well designed hood and James Ravilious, a photographer whose work I greatly admire, used to design his own hoods to use with uncoated Leica lenses because of the character they produced in their rendering. All my lenses are fitted with a simple rubber hood and some have their own built in hood or special metal version. Why spend so much on a decent optic, only to degrade the image by not using what I consider to be an essential accessory ?

 

[Richard G]

I hardly take a shot without a hood. The reversed Leica hoods capped over the lens were a great education in this regard. You had to remove the hood to operate the lens and once in the hand the easiest thing was to mount it for shooting. Keeps rain and fingerprints off the lens too.

 

[farlymac]

I will pass on a lens if I can find one with its hood, even if it costs more, because sometimes when you find a hood without its lens, the owner is asking way too much for it. I consider a hood to be very important, except on some of the deep set lenses such as the older 35mm or wider LTM types.

PF

 

[02Pilot]

I use metal hoods on just about everything, as much for the reduction in flare as for the protection. It's nice that cheap generic hoods are available for a lot of lenses these days, as the originals can be hideously expensive.

 

[giganova]

I never use a lens hood because it defeats the purpose of shooting with a small rangefinder, and because I change filters very frequently and a lens hood is simply not practical.

 

[seany65]

I've got a slotted hood on my Ricoh 500gx, and while it's going to take a while to get used to it sticking into the viewfinder, I will still use it.

When I hold the camera 'normally' the hood does partially block the bottom half of the rangefinder window, all I have to do is slide the camera up by a fraction of an inch and I can see all of the rangefinder window to focus with. It's quicker than focusing on the eyes and then re-framing, when doing a portrait.

 

[michaelwj]

I never use a lens hood because it defeats the purpose of shooting with a small rangefinder, and because I change filters very frequently and a lens hood is simply not practical.

I always use hoods, but use those with inbuilt filters like the Leica 12504 hood that screws apart, or that that just hold the filter in like the one for the Super Angulon. With the former, I have more than one so just swap hoods, with the latter it's so easy to just clip it off and on again. Both are so much faster than those pesky screw in filters, they're a pain.