What is a lens hood?
Have you ever asked any of the following questions?
What does a lens hood do?
Do I need one?
Why square? What's wrong with round?
Why your lens hood?
Well they're great questions, so let's answer them!
(2 minute read)
What does a lens hood do?
The primary job of a lens hood is to shade the front of your lens, to keep light from falling across the lens and causing unwanted flare and a washed out, low contrast look, this occurs when shooting towards the sun or a powerful light source.
Lens hoods also protect the glass from wandering fingers and other items coming into contact with the glass, a metal lens hood also offers great protection if you drop your camera, the hood breaks the fall and takes the impact, saving your expensive lens.
This is amplified on fixed lens cameras, such as the Fujifilm X100 Series or the Ricoh GR series, if you drop one of these and damage the lens then the whole camera is destroyed.
On top of the above they also make your camera look just a little bit cooler.
Do I need one?
In short, yes.
It depends on a few things. Do you want to save time in post? What is your appetite for risk? Do you want to chance if you drop your camera that it will land on a pillow.
You can do a quick google search to see what lens flare looks like, but you have surely experienced it before. It can be fixed to a certain degree in Photoshop but it is time consuming and you have to shoot raw to get the edit flawless.
Why square? What's wrong with round?
This is a question we get all the time and is a valid point.
So if a lens hood's primary job is to protect the photo from lens flare and stray light, then there is your clue, a photo is square, or technically rectangular for those geometry savvy readers.
So square / rectangular shaped lens hoods are better designed to protect the frame, they offer tighter protection because of their smaller opening and same shape as the frame.
Round is great and all, but it doesn't offer the same level of protection as a square hood and again it doesn't look as good, (in our opinion)
Why your lens hood?
Because they are designed by photographers for photographers, we know what we need, we think about the whole process, our hoods are designed for the specific lenses they attach to, this sounds obvious but some companies will design a universal hood to fit multiple lenses, to save money in production, compromising on the design and the look of the hood and the way it connects to the camera.
All our hoods are designed to look like a part of the camera / lens, we hide the connection detail.
We don't appeal to the masses, that's not our goal, we appeal to photographers who appreciate good design and overall functionality. And the quality matches the quality of the camera /lens.
That's a guarantee, if you are not satisfied, then you can send it back for a full refund of the product price. This guarantee is also what separates us from our competitors.
If you have made it this far then your are either interested or crazy.
Either way if you purchase a lens hood from us, you will receive two of our mini softy shutter buttons for free, just enter the code softy once you have added them to your cart.
Thank you for reading, if you have any questions please feel free to contact us at support@squarehood.se