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Dave's Favorites: FlexHood Reduces Lens Flare

Every serious photographer who has come to digital photography from the world of 35mm SLRs has drooled over cameras like the Nikon D1, Canon D30, and Fuji S1 because they offer something you can't get from run-of-the-mill digital cameras: interchangeable lenses. With a Nikon D1x, for instance, you can use all the wide-angle and telephoto lenses you collected for your old 35mm Nikon camera.

These cameras are by no means cheap, but they've become a lot more affordable recently. If you have one, you may have discovered an ugly secret about using your old lenses with your new digital camera: lens flare.

That's right, the lens hood that came with your old 80-200mm zoom isn't effective with your digital camera because your digital camera magnifies the effect of the lens, effectively making it longer than it is on a 35mm camera. The Canon D30, for instance, has a focal length magnification factor of 1.6. So if you attach a 200mm lens to the camera, it behaves like a 320mm lens. The lens hood wasn't designed for that, so you can get unwanted light effects in your digital images.

That's okay, though, because I recently ran across an inexpensive solution. A company called TrueDigitalPhoto has created a $6 product called FlexHood, which is a flexible film that wraps around an existing lens hood to extend its range. FlexHood uses a nondrying adhesive that leaves no residue, so you can apply it for digital photography, remove it for film work, and put it back on again later without damaging your hood. It's available for a vast array of lenses from Nikon, Canon, Tokina, and others.