A funny lens hood to kill all window reflections

Have you ever wanted to shoot out of a window, but the reflections ruin the shot?  Introducing the Haida super wide-angle silicone lens hood (Amazon, B&H).

As the name describes, this is a silicone hood for your lens. It’s has a designed contort to seal around a window to cut out unwanted reflections. It comes in two sizes, One for 50-70mm lens and another for 70-90mm lens. Most of my lenses are on the larger side, so I opted for the 70-90mm version.

The large hood is 210mm wide and is designed to stretch over your lens to hold in place. You can even do this while the lens is mounted. Check the photo above.

While going from the front will work fine for some lenses, I found it much easier to slide the lens’s smaller side through first. Then pull it onto the front and mount the lens back onto the camera.

Shooting with the hood is easy. You put the lens as close to the window as you can, then shape the lens hood to make a seal around the window. Here’s a quick demonstration from a window overlooking the marina in Kirkintilloch Scotland using the Sigma FP with 24-70mm f2.8 Art DG DN.

As this is called a Super Wide Angle Lens Hood, I also tried this with my Sigma 14-24 f2.8. I’m happy to say that it works really well from 20mm onwards, fully extended. Wider than that, though, you need to take some care to position the hood to work well. The hood will also act as some extra protection from strong light hitting the lens at a side angle, which could help in some situations.

While the lens hoods are pretty large, you can easily store them because they bend and fold. This makes it easy to keep one squshed in a bag for when the need arises.

I found one downside with my Sigma 24-70 f2.8, when the lens hood ends up on the extending barrel of the lens. It limits the zoom rage to 35mm at the wide end.  Not a big issue if mounted properly but just something to keep in mind.

Not everyone needs a silicone window-reflection-killing lens hood. On the other hand, there are many times when such a thing would have been welcome in my travels. Since it is relatively inexpensive, has a small footprint in the bag, and has such a positive effect, I feel it’s worth keeping in the bag just in case.

The Haida Super Wide Angle Silicone lens hood can be had for $12.90 for the 50-70mm or 70-90mm versions or both for $25.00. Do you think this is a useful tool?