Printing and Fitting
Tips on printing and fitting your lens hood
Printing lens hoods
Please ensure you print each PDF document at 100% size. Do not expand or shrink the document to fit the page, as this will cause the lens hood to be the wrong size for your lens. Our lens hoods are designed to fit on ISO standard paper sizes of A4, A3 or A2. Please note that A4 is slightly larger than "US letter" paper size, so be sure not to scale the document to fit.
If you cannot open any of the PDF documents on this site, please download and install Adobe Reader before trying again.
It is strongly recommended that you print onto strong card, as ordinary paper is too flimsy to be used as a lens hood. Dark grey card offers the best performance, as it reflects less light internally. Black card will be even better, although it may be difficult to follow the guide lines when cutting out your lens hood.
Fitting lens hoods
Each lens hood must be cut out and curled up to form a circular hood shape. Some of the more complicated lens hood designs will be easier to cut out with the help of a sharp craft knife, but please be careful. Once curled up, the lens hood can be secured by gluing or taping the tab to the other end.
The base end of the hood features a number of tabs which are designed to be gently folded to fit loosely over the end of the lens. Once in place, you can secure the lens hood to the lens using a strong elastic band. If you are after a more permanent fixture, you can secure it with black electrical tape.
Testing and modifying your lens hood
If you discover your lens hood is causing vignetting at wider angles, you can detach the lens hood and trim off any excess. While we have access to a large number of SLR camera lenses, we are unable to test every combination, so please let us know if you believe one of our lens hoods has been designed incorrectly.
Submit your photos
If you are particularly proud of your lens hood, please email a photo of it to us, along with a description of what you have used it for. The best submissions will be included in a gallery on this web site in the near future.
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All content and lens hoods copyright
Paul Mutton 2008 and beyond
