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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Categories: ? | Lens mods
Tags: Lens hood
This entry is © Haje Jan Kamps / Photocritic.org, and was posted on Monday, April 24th, 2006. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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#1 - April 25th, 2006 at 14:41
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.
#2 - July 20th, 2006 at 00:39
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.
#3 - October 2nd, 2006 at 04:12
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.
#4 - February 27th, 2007 at 00:39
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?
#5 - February 11th, 2008 at 09:01
[...] Alternatively, you can use a lens hood (it’s one of those attachments that go onto the front of your lens - on the picture above, it is the flowery-shaped attachment), which will go a long way to blocking out stray light. You can also get straight lens hoods (without the flower-shape), or you can even make your own. [...]