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I'm more relaxed about using hoods than most other posters in this thread.
Yes, hoods can be very useful, but you typically realise when that is the case. In many cases, a hood will make a minute difference, if any at all.
Most modern lenses feature coatings and inner barrel designs that make them much less prone to flaring, losing contrast, etc., when faced with non-image forming light.
I only use hoods when I feel that they will make a difference and have seen no ill-effects caused by this strategy. Any minute gain in contrast that I may have gained in some instance, will be overshadowed by what I do in post-processing to the image.
N.B., hoods on zooms are only appropriately sized for the wide end. For the long end, they could/should be much longer. I guess that using a hood on a zoom makes some sense for settings other than the wide end as well, but one should not kid oneself into believing that one is using an appropriate hood at other settings.
Sometimes, BTW, I like the effects of non-image forming light on an image. There are legitimate reasons to not use a hood, even when its use would be warranted. Just to be clear, though, that's not the reason why I mostly use none.
Originally posted by alamo5000 You have the straight hoods, flower hoods, and wide flaring hoods...
Which one is most desireable and for what?
A flower (petal-shaped) hood has a shape that is defined by the intersection between the cylinder implied by the (round) lens barrel and the pyramidal light volume implied by the (rectangular) sensor and the lens' AOV. All real-life petal-shaped hoods are truncated at the front end, to reduce length, however.
As such, a petal-shaped hood represents the smallest hood for a given blockage of unwanted, non-image forming light.
I understand all hood designs are a compromise between light blockage and portability. A flaring design allows you to have a longer hood, and thus obtain more blockage, but at the expense of a larger size and potentially excluding reverse mounting of the hood.
Last edited by Class A; 06-27-2012 at 07:42 PM.