Make your own Lens Hood!
Lens hoods are great devices – basically, they allow you to shoot more directly into the sun (i.e at a more acute angle compared to the sunrays) without getting the dreaded solar flares.
Unfortunately, lens hoods can be silly expensive. But, as you all know when I make a statement like that, there is a cheaper way of doing things – in fact, a much cheaper way!
Lenshoods.co.uk is the solution – the site contains PDF templates that can be printed and cut out to make lens hoods for a variety of 35mm and digital SLR camera lenses, with a large series of templates available for all the major camera manufacturers and lenses.
If you print them out on thick black paper, and cut them out carefully, the lens hoods work as well as the official ones – at next to no cost! Fantastic.
Why bother? Well… The site explains it best itself:
Even modest lens hoods are pretty expensive. For example, a replacement lens hood for the Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L will set you back £45.99. Even the most basic lens such as the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II will cost you £17.99 if you want to add a lens hood.
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In front of you, five hyperactive men with guitars, drums, and microphones. Behind you, five thousand fans. In your hands, a camera... You're going to need more than just a little bit of good luck to pull this one off. That's where this book comes in.
Take a Canon EOS 450D. Attach a Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens. Hit the streets of London. See what happens.
Insights, suggestions and comments
I made one of these last night for my Canon 17-85 f/4-5.6. The shape looked about right but due to my incredibly bad cutting/sticking skills I wouldn’t be seen dead in public with it.
The tabs just got in the way of zooming, so I cut them off and relied on the poor craftsmanship making it an oval shape to hold it to the lens.
What it _did_ do, though, is convince me that a hood is a good idea, even if it’s only a short one like this is. I experimented holding the camera at various angles and it really did shade the front element from quite a lot of positions – way better than I had expected.
I’ll try to link a photo of it tonight.
I don’t like this idea very much, the lens hood is not only good for avoiding flares, it is also for lens protection against impact. Let me suggest this interesting article on the matter from Bob Johnson.
I know when I have ever made the silly, silly mistake of misplacing my lens cap, I keep the hood on so that I can only damage the lens with something really, really pointy. ^_^
I keep the hood backwards on the lens all the time anyway so I have it when I need it—I hate lens flare.
Doesn’t havin the lens hood on backwards keep you from easilly changing apature settings. I mean if it affects your abillity to change the zoom setting, (which on a normal lense is quite the bit far away from the body) wouldn’t it do the same for the apature?
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