Richard Hales Photography Blog

You can help me not to commit a crime! One day soon I am going to wrestle a DSLR off an unsuspecting numpty on the the street. I’m not stealing, although it may appear that way to the numpty, policeman, judge, jury etc., but to help. “Help, how?” I hear you cry, surely the taking of something is no help at all. It is if you return the said piece of photographic equipment back in a more usable state than when you took it.

I think I should backtrack a little and explain what is irking me to take such drastic action. I live a village that is pleasantly not quite near to anywhere but it is vaguely near Straford upon Avon and we also spend quite a bit of time in my old home town of Oxford. And something that unites those two places is tourists, lots of ‘em. For some strange reason (possibly a fetish) I can spot a DSLR at a hundred paces and as often as not thy numpty toting it is committing a cardinal error (possibly an exaggeration, but run with it, please). What is this cardinal error (still running with it?)? They’ve got their lens hood on the wrong way around!

OK, this is a small thing and one or two would be fine but it seems to be a rampant problem, so rampant it has awoken a latent OCD I didn’t know I had. This is isn’t important in the grand scale of things but it would help these poor souls if they did have the piece of plastic the right way around:

Firstly, the real reason for the lens hood, to stop non-image forming light reaching the focal plane (textbook exam answer from my initial photography training in 1989). Or, put in layman’s terms, to stop glare.

Another good reason is it protects the front element of your lens, lenshoods cost a tenner front elements a tad more.

By protecting the lens with the hood you don’t have to the lens cap on and you are ready to shoot without faffing around.

Lastly, by having the hood the right way around it make the lens easier to use without having an extraneous piece of plastic fouling the zoom or focus ring.

So, if you see someone committing this “crime” have a word in their ear, or wrestle their camera from them (that is a joke and not a real suggestion!). If you are a person who does this please stop, for the sake of my clean criminal record, and remember the hood sticks out from you lens making it look bigger and who doesn’t want a bigger looking lens!