Do you need a hood?
Lens hoods can be expensive. Canon’s L-series lenses come supplied with a lens hood as standard, but most other Canon lenses don’t come with a hood when new. While a hood for a lens such as the EF 50mm f1.8 STM is under £20, if you have an EF 600mm lens the hood alone can cost nearly £700.
So do you really need one (or several if you have more than one lens)? Take a look at your recent photos. Do any of them suffer from flare or reduced contrast? If not, you can probably manage without.
Canon also keeps innovating with its lens technologies, and in recent years has developed coatings such as Super Spectra Coating (SSC) which are intended to reduce ghosting and flare. Whilst these technologies reduce flare, none can eliminate entirely.
Lens hoods offer a secondary use – lens protection. Scrape a lens without a hood against a wall and you could damage the filter mount orscratch the front element. With a hood, the damage will be limited. There are many reports of a camera and hooded lens being dropped with the only damage being to the easily replaceable hood.
To be honest, not all the lenses at EOS magazine have a hood, but that does not stop us recommending their use, if only for the protection they can offer.
