The supplied lens hood with Nikon's 50mm f/1.8 G is HB-47 Bayonet Lens Hood, as mentioned on the tech specs for that lens.
Is it the best for this lens or should I look for a better one? If yes, then on what basis?
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Sign up to join this communityThe supplied lens hood with Nikon's 50mm f/1.8 G is HB-47 Bayonet Lens Hood, as mentioned on the tech specs for that lens.
Is it the best for this lens or should I look for a better one? If yes, then on what basis?
The supplied or purposely built hood is the safest to use on a lens.
While you can easily find a hood that fits the lens, getting one which works as well is a matter of luck. Even it a hood fits, it can still cause vignetting. I learned the hard way since two of my hoods have the same size :(
If you do not accidentally get one which a too narrow field of view, you may get one with a too wide field of view which affords less protection against flare than the specific hood which is made for your lens.
The one option to consider for physical protection is a retractable rubber hood which you can extend to protect and retract without removing it before shooting.
As far as the 50mm goes, I'd say that going with the standard hood is a pretty safe bet. However, it should be added (for completeness) that if a full-format lens - ie one made for 24x36 mm FX sensors - comes with a hood, that hood will be shorter than it could have been to be if you are using a DX cropped sensor. In other terms, you can use a longer hood on a DX sensor without the hood vignetting the image, this will give you better flare protection and better mechanical protection of the front element. Plus you will look more manly of course, with a "longer" lens :)
Sigma does take this into account on a couple of their newest lenses such as the 85mm f/1.8, they come with a normal "FX" hood that you can clip an extension to for use on a DX camera. Rather clever actually.
As a purely practical matter, this can be of interest for wide-angle lenses such as the Canon 17-40 and 16-35 if used on EF-S or 1.3-crop 1D-series cameras. The full-frame hood for these lenses is more akin to a soup-dish than a lens-hood, it is so short that it gives minimal physical protection to the lens and much wider than the lens body so that it is impractical to carry around when the lens is off the camera. I have used a hood designed for a 24mm lens with good effect on the 17-40 even on a full-frame Canon 5D, I ha to grind away a few millimeters of plastic from the tips of the hood petals so that it did not vignette and that was it. That hood gave better flare protection, better physical protection and was a lot more practical because it could be reversed on the lens and still fit into a normal-sized carrying pouch.
The standard hood is certainly good enough most of the time, especially if you're using it more for lens protection that for flare problems. The only real improvement you will find, and it's only necessary at all in very tricky lighting where a light source is just outside of the frame, and usually when you're using filters in the plural, is a rectangular hood that almost exactly matches the field of view.
Leica uses this style of hood by default. For the rest of us, it usually means a tulip-shaped hood from the lens manufacturer. Both of those styles have their own problems -- it's difficult to manage filters, especially polarizers, with the hood mounted. (A round screw-on hood, like the one for the older AF-D-type 50mm, rotates with the filter, so it's not a problem at all.)
The other alternative is a compendium hood or a matte box. They're a bellows arrangement that can be set to match the field of view perfectly, and usually have their own filter mounting and rotating system built-in. But they're not something that hangs off of the front of the camera -- you mount the camera onto the hood. They're large, heavy and cumbersome, and pretty much rule out hand-held shooting unless you're using a video support rail system (like the Zacutto rigs), and then you're usually restricted to shooting in landscape orientation.
If flare is a particular problem, and the standard hood is no help, the practical solution is usually to use a flag -- a piece of fabric, board, or even a hand -- outside of the frame to shade the lens from the problem light source.
The front element of most 50s is recessed so far that I have never bothered with a hood for them. So, I'd likely use it without any hood at all unless I came to realize that it was needed. In which case I'd just use the supplied one.