Lens Hoods and Filters
So I’ve got a Lee Filter set (which I’m very happy with) and would like to buy a lens hood that will provide suitable flare protection (I use a flag at the moment but I’m thining about all that non-image forming light bouncing around in the camera, especially with lenses like the 110XL and 240A which cover about 4-6 x the area that is used. (see diagram below for the amount of extra light your camera receives – format of image plagiarised from Schneider docs)
Lee offer three different hood options. The wide angle hood, the universal hood and the standard hood. I bought a wide angle hood off ebay for a good price so this is the first I am working with. (By the way, thanks to Tre at Robert White for measuring the hood sizes)
This hood will only really work with the 80 and 110 lenses so my criteria are:
1) 80mm + centre filter + alignable grad + warming + polariser + hood.
The first 2 items mean using a push on filter with a 100mm hole and a 100-90 bushing. This is fine. I add two slots to this and use a tandem adapter to mount the wide angle hood (configured with one slot). Bad news… This vignettes in the corners. Now I have mounted a polariser ring on the inside of the wide angle hood (it was a good fit) but this doesn’t seem to make the problem much worse.
Just as an experiment, I tried using 1 filter holder on the push on and attached it to the lenshood with blue tack. This works a treat even with the polariser mounted (although I’m getting very small corner crops which I think are curable by using a slimline polariser (I’m using the Lee 105 polariser at the moment which is very thick).
I’ve ordered a bunch of very powerful 1mm thick magnets which should allow me to mount filter holders very close to each other and at about 30 degree intervals (enough for most very wide work I imagine). We’ll see where this leads.
2) 110mm with/without centre filter. The above solutions works a treat with the standard layout.
3) 150mm lens. This should be fine with the WA Hood but would be better with the standard hood. (see diagram at the top of the page)
4) 240/360/500 – I think that these would be best accomodated by adding masks to the front mount of the standard hood.
The main problem then is solving the 80mm lens issue. If I can manage a solution for this, then the rest of the lens fit niceley. Lets hope some magnetronic jiggery pokery works.
