>> >> Are you supposed to use a lens hood when shooting indoors >or at night, or is >> the hood only to prevent flare from sunlight?
If I may offer the list my working practices.... My lowest common denominator is: if in doubt, use the lenshood. However, it is quite obvious that a lenshood serves more than one purpose. Two of the most important ones are eliminating flare from a direct light source (like the sun), and increasing contrast (by cutting down on as much extraneous light entering the lens as possible. However, when I'm shooting indoors with flash, say a function, with room lights etc then I usually leave the hood off. One could argue that wall-mounted tungsten lights are a terrible source of flare but actually I couldn't give a monkey's wotsit and just go for it. Part of the trick is to remain as hidden as possible, and lurching a camera around is bad enough, but protruding lenshoods, especially shaped like huge wavy flowery things from Holland, don't make for decent snaps as one quickly becomes the centre of attention when one is trying to be just the opposite. OTOH, some lenshoods are pretty useless even when used as designed. Outside in the sun, I use a flag to shade the lens on wide angle landscapes - it really helps a lot. Just moving onto zooms. Anyone thinking about the mechanics of a zoom lens will have surely pondered that the lenshood of such an optic will have to be a compromise. Now, if you have a 28-70 mm (say), then you will have deduced that the(fixed plastic or metal) hood is really a 28mm hood and nowhere near good enough to use at the 70 mm end. If you used a hood suitable for the 70mm end while 'zoomed out' at 28mm, you would suffer vignetting (dark corners of the frame) as the hood intruded on the picture. Of course, the answer is to alter the lenshood as the zoom lens focal length is altered. Fixed hoods cannot do this - a bellows hood can, and is really the only suitable answer to this particular problem. Anything else is generally a compromise. Someday, somebody will invent a dynamic dedicated hood for zooms, so that the length and shape changes as you zoom :-) Probably already here for all I know. Best, Cotty ____________________________________ Oh, swipe me! He paints with light! http://www.macads.co.uk/snaps/ ____________________________________ Free UK Macintosh Classified Ads at http://www.macads.co.uk/ ____________________________________
