Digital Home Thoughts: Free Printable Lens Hoods

"Paul Mutton doesn’t want you to spend twenty bucks on buying a useful, but painfully simple, piece of black plastic. Lens hoods, those round plastic rings that sit at the end of your SLR’s lens, are great at preventing lens flare and unwanted reflections when shooting in sunlight. Unfortunately, buying or replacing one can be surprisingly expensive. So Paul created a whole series of printable, foldable, paper lens hoods you can download for free! Just look up your Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, Sigma, Tamron, or Tokina lens, print out the corresponding lens hood, fold it up, and slap it on. They even fold back up to make ‘em easier to carry around!"



I am actually quite surprised by this service. While it makes sense to do this for the $800 lens hoods, times when one finds such expensive hoods is extremely rare. Usually they are a few tens of dollars. Plus, the ones made from plastic are obviously more durable. :) Of course, it makes sense that if one wants to try out a lens hood temporarily, this would be a good place to start. It's free! And I guess it would be nice to print this on stiff card stock to make it more durable.