I shoot a lot of photos outdoors, and I throw away a lot of images because of lens flare. I use an Olympus E300 digital SLR, and I keep Hoya UV filters on the lenses, mostly to reduce the danger of scratching to the (muy expensive) lenses. Would a polarizing filter help get rid of these lens flares that destroy so many of my images?
Octagonal you say... could we see an example? My understanding is that flares are caused by light coming into the optics at an extreme angle and bouncing around in there a bit instead of getting absorbed. A hood would serve to limit the angle of the incident light. You can also get a flare from the wierd angle light hitting your filter. A hood would help this as well.
I guess I'll have to start packing a hood around in my already cramoed camera bag. Actually it used to be a camera bag. Now it's more like a camera sack with all the stuff I haul around. I guess this is what people call, "obsession" :-)
the octaganal shape is due to the shape of the aperture, which isnt a pure circle, it is and octagan because of the 8 or however many plates there are constructing it. Stopping down to a smaller aperture- f/14 at least- should help reduce the flare. a hood would be very useful, i always have one attatched to my telephoto, but i havnt realy found it nesecary for wide angle.
some lenses are much worse with flare than others, so it could be a flare prone lens...
It might be more than eight. It may actually be twelve, but without having it in front of me I had to guess octagonal. You actually think that conical hood will do the trick, eh? I have two of them; one is a cone and the other a sort of cut-out cone with two sides cut away. I can't figure out what that one's for, but most people I see with hoods seem to be using the cut-away one.
For your wide angle lens use the shortest one, otherwise you will get Severe vignetting and picture cut off because the wide angle brings the long shade into the sides of the picture. im not sure about the cut outs either but i thought they may be are for the two sides of the picture, to prevent vignetting because the image is wider than it is high...
The "cut out" style is called a petal-type or "perfect hood". This is because when used on a zoom (such as a 70-200mm) there will be no vignetting at the wide end, yet the hood extends far enough out to prevent flare at the tele end.
If you look through the hood (from the end that you attach to the lens), you will see that the cut-outs form a rectangle, which coincides with the aspect ratio of the image. to prevent vignetting.
My gosh! He's right! I just looked through my hood, and it does exactly that. Now what smart cookie came up with that idea? Does this mean i should use it in preference to the full hood?
When I was a boy of fourteen,
my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around.
But when I got to be twenty one, I was astonished
at how much he had learned in seven years."
Mark Twain
Thats what i was thinking. If you used the right kind of paper i can't see why they wouldn't work. I suppose now i will have to go out a buy a new lens that needs a hood so i can try it. My lenses are either not accostomed to flares or already have a hood that came with them:P.