About lens hoods

[fotografya]

I wonder, do you have all of your lenses hood mounted while shooting in daylight outdoors? Does this really help for

better metering and reduce lens flare? Or does it just depend on the direction of the light coming in?

[lex_jenkins]

Depends on the lens and the light.

 

Some lenses, like some moderate speed "normal" lenses (a typical 50mm f/1.8), have deeply recessed front elements. The lens barrel itself serves as a fairly effective lens hood. With those lenses a separate shade isn't absolutely necessary in most lighting conditions.

 

Other lenses are very vulnerable to veiling flare even from diffuse lighting, such as a bright overcast sky. So some wide angle primes, wide angle zooms and midrange zooms can benefit from a hood or other form of shading under most, if not all lighting conditions.

 

Some meters are affected by flare, some aren't. It's easy to test and see. Some older point and shoot cameras didn't have TTL metering but had metering cells mounted near the lens. An incorrectly designed lens hood could actually block the metering cell and lead to inaccurate exposures.

[chris_werner]

It's not just obvious flaring - you also lose contrast from the scattering of light through the optics. Since the hood stops the entry of light at obtuse angles, less light gets scattered in the optical elements, improving contrast.

 

But flare is by far the more noticeable effect.

[BrianS1664879711]

I always use a lens hood. Always.

[William Michael]

> do you have all of your lens`s hood mounted while shooting in daylight outdoors <

 

I do, Yes, always, (and inside too), except for some macro work.

 

> Does this really help for better metering and reduce lens flare? <

 

If it is the correct hood, yes. In some cases, an addition shade (like the left hand fro example) might be useful to address veiling flare.

 

FYI more about Flare:

 

http://www.photo.net/beginner-photography-questions-forum/00QxjQ

 

WW

[jimstrutz]

Lens hoods also provide a modest amount of protection from bumps and oily fingers. I nearly always use one.

[mark u]

An excellent discussion of lens hoods:

 

http://www.vanwalree.com/optics/lenshood.html

 

and flare:

 

http://www.vanwalree.com/optics/flare.html

 

Camera metering is usually done with the lens wide open. Although an incorrect hood can cause vignetting (and perhaps become clearly visible if you shoot at a narrow aperture) the effect on metering will be relatively slight, since the image corners are usually not given much weight in metering. With fast lenses, there is potentially a much greater metering/vignetting problem from vignetting by the lens barrel - this is illustrated in the first article above. One way in which this is handled in SLRs is to narrow the metering aperture through the design of the focussing screen where the meter reads off the focussing screen: the metering algorithm also takes account of the metering aperture. If you are using a focussing screen that is designed to help with focussing fast lenses manually, it affects metering severely, and needs to be taken account of by the metering algorithm - there are usually special settings for this.

[rich_evans]

In addition to using a lens hood for the reasons stated above, I never use 1A or Skylight or UV filters in front of my lenses so I depend on the lens hoods to protect the front element. --Rich