The biggest downside is they add a bit of bulk and are awkward to pack. They improve the quality of your images and keep your lenses a little safer with almost no tradeoffs. Generally, you should use a lens hood all the time. When to Use a Lens Hood Unless you’re going for a deliberate look, like this image, it’s best to use a lens hood. It might not save the lens from smashing, but at least the glass front element won’t be the first thing that hits the floor. Similarly, if you bang the lens against something when shooting at a busy wedding or, even worse, knock it off a table, a lens hood provides an extra barrier on the front. It’s not a replacement for an umbrella, but it can give you a few moments to get a shot before your lens is covered in water and unusable. If you’re shooting on a rainy day or near a waterfall, for example, a lens hood can shelter the front of the lens from some of the droplets. While lens hoods are mostly for blocking light, they also provide a small amount of physical protection. Lens Hoods Also Provide Some Physical Protection It’s the same as when you shade your eyes from the sun with your hand when you’re trying to see something. What a lens hood does is simple: it shades the front element of the lens and prevents light from hitting it from the most extreme angles. The image shot with the lens hood is just better quality. There’s also a bit of a bright flare in the bottom right corner. In the image shown above without the lens hood, you can see the colors and contrast are a bit muted. Haziness can be a bit harder to spot, but the effect is no less desirable. Abrams loves to use them in his movies as an effect, but, for the most part, they’re unwanted.

Lens flares are those streaks of bright light that appear in a photo. The two most obvious effects of this are lens flares and a washed-out, hazy appearance. The rays from more extreme angles are never focused on the sensor they just bounce around inside the lens, interfering with the quality of the photo. Light rays are also hitting the front of the lens from every other direction.

This means less light makes it to the camera sensor than the amount that enters the lens, which is why cinema lenses use t-stops instead of f-stops.Īnd that’s just for the light rays reflected off the scene you’re trying to photograph. In addition to being focused and manipulated in intended ways, there’s a transmission loss. The light rays don’t pass through the different glass elements unaffected, either.

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