This is a topic I can’t stress enough. I wrote about it once before in my article devoted to high bang-for-your-buck items to have in your camera bag. What we are really talking about here is a win win win WIN piece of equipment. That’s right. 4 wins.
They are as follows, for you TLDR folks: A protection of your investment, a boost to image quality, they are super cheap, and let’s be honest, it makes you look more professional because uncle Bob doesn’t have one.
As an aside for you newcomers to the industry, uncle Bob is a generic term for the guy that’s at the event you’re shooting who showed up with expensive gear (maybe comparable to yours) but little to no education, who may or may not take good photos but inevitably and perpetually gets in your way. But I digress!
The lens hood is an essential piece of gear. I don’t care what you paid for your lens, the front element is worth protecting because your image quality depends on it. In this beginner’s article I wrote on gear in general, I emphasize that good lenses are a better investment than good bodies. The fact is that they are reinvented less often, once maybe every five or sometimes even ten years instead of every two or three, like bodies are. So they keep their value longer in that they are not thought of as “outdated” quite as frequently. Even older versions of the same lens still maintain value in the marketplace. This is why your #1 priority with your lenses should be to keep them safe.
Have you ever paid for a lens repair? I am sad to say I have. Many new photographers are looking for lenses in the $100-$350 range. Imagine paying $500 to just regain the functionality of the lens you already own and paid more like $1800 for. That’s just under 1/3 of its value, and trust me, it is a depressing bill to swallow (see what I did there?). So above all, lens hoods are a protection of your investment from bumps, dents and scratches, even small drops might be thwarted by a lens hood in its proper place.
My second reason is that, yes, they do offer improvements in image quality. Ever seen a pro golfer without a hat? A baseball player? Virtually every professional who works outdoors wears a hat. The reason is no secret to anyone who has shielded the sun with their hand or dropped the visor in their car’s front seats: it’s because the shielding of indirect sunlight increases contrast (deep blacks), color (saturation), and clarity (edge visibility). Football players do a similar thing with eye black. Light that comes into your lens at an indirect angle causes it to funnel onto your sensor improperly. The light bounces around inside instead of coming directly in, and hazes and lens flares are the result. Especially if you are a beginner, those lenses in the $100-$350 range are not engineered to the point where they control lens flares and haze very well. Very expensive lenses, especially wide angle lenses that are pricy, are specifically designed to eliminate flare, so adding a lens hood is one way that you can gain some of the advantages of professional shooters with high end gear without the high end price tag, which brings me to my third point:
These things are just so stinking cheap! Man, at like $10-$20 bucks, how could you simply not? There are so many insurance policies in life that just aren’t worth what they claim to be worth, this is not one of them. Because of the slowly descending value of lenses, this investment is not only worth it, but for me, it would be a huge selling point if I read while looking at buying a used lens (which I do, by the way) that it had a lens hood (in conjunction with a UV filter, preferably) on it from day 1. So for $20 or so, you can not only protect your investment while you use it, but make your lens more marketable if the time comes to put it back into the market so you can upgrade your gear to something better. It just makes cents (man, I’m on a roll) to use a lens hood every. single. day.
My fourth reason is a bit of a guilty pleasure, but if there’s one thing photographers like almost as much as being professional, it’s looking professional. Especially for Canon lenses, which I shoot with, these hoods do not always come with lenses and many times have to be purchased separately. That’s a bit of a gripe I have with Canon, but nonetheless, at least they are cheap to get. Still, look at the sideline at an NFL game and spot an end-zone photographer without a lens hood on. You’ll be hard-pressed to find one, I assure you. And the reason is clear, professionals use them, so when you use one, you will look more professional. Hobbyists often don’t use hoods because they don’t come with their lenses and either they don’t know what they are for, or they don’t understand why they should have one, and they remain just that, amateurs, because their image quality suffers the consequences. So in this case, it’s not just about being a poser and being flashy, but it doesn’t hurt that doing yourself favors in the image quality department also gives the outward appearance of professionalism.
Lastly, as the title implied, I promised to point you in a direction to where you could purchase one. There are many, many lens hoods out there. They are made to fit the diameter of each lens, and they are made by both big brand companies like Canon and Nikon, but also third parties. What you go with is up to you on that front, but all you need to do to find the right one for your lens is to follow this link to the magical place where all things can be bought and add in to the pre-filled search the model of your lens and voila, you’ll have options galore.
If you don’t have one, get one now, it’s just the right thing to do on so many levels (at least four, by my count).
Any questions? Comment below and I’ll clear things up asap.
