First test PRICE: £20
ULTIMATELENSHOOD.COM
The Ultimate Lens Hood ULHgo
This floppy lens hood is designed to remove reflections from your photos when shooting through glass
SPECS
› Price £20 What's in the box: › ULHgo hood andmicrofibre bag › Materials: Silicone rubber › Fits: filter sizes from49-82mm › Dimensions (WxHxD): Open, 21x21x12cm; folded, 21x21x1.5cm › Weight: 180g › Contact ultimatelenshood.com also add some electrical tape to the edges if required. Removing the hood is just as easy as fitting it, and it retained its shape perfectly as far as I could tell. Time would tell on this, but there’s no reason to think it would lose its stretch unless torn. The silicone rubber also has an anti-static coating, which did a good job of keeping it free of dust and fluff, and comes with a microfibre bag. KS
Many good photographic accessories are created to solve specific problems and the Ultimate Lens Hood (ULH) is all about tackling reflections when shooting through glass. We’ve probably all been in a situation where this is an issue and interfered with a view, usually having climbed to an observation deck to take photos, or perhaps when shooting out of a hotel room window. Usually, the only solution is to turn off room lights, assuming they’re under your control, or press your lens’s front element as close to the window as possible, which limits composition and may damage the lens, too. The bellows-style, floppy silicone rubber ULH instead presses against the glass to create a light-tight seal around the front element and remove reflections almost entirely. The ULHgo version, which we’re reviewing here, is new to the range, joining the ULHlarge, ULHmini and ULHmobile, sitting in between the former two in size. The ULHgo is billed as the ‘travel-sized hood’ and it fits the widest range of lenses, covering those with filter sizes from
49mm to 82mm. It collapses into a disc about 1.5cm thick for storage. To mount the hood, you simply stretch it over the lens front. It’s very easy, and there’s no adapter or locking ring required, as it’s held by its elasticity. As you’d expect, it feels more secure on larger sized lenses where the added stretch gives more tension. It definitely fits on some lenses better than others. For instance, I tried it on a Fujifilm 18mm f/2, and despite that lens having a 52mm thread, it’s so short in length that the ULH either has to wrap around the aperture ring, or the focus ring. Of course in cases like that, you can work around it by setting aperture to be controlled from the body, and use AF – or mount the ULH to the lens’s own hood. At the other end of the scale, I tried it on my Sigma 14-24mm f/2.8 Art lens, which despite having an integrated lens hood that’s slightly wider than the spec’d 82mm, the ULH wrapped around perfectly well. The problem in this case was more about physical vignetting from the hood. The lens’s view is so wide that
you need to be careful not to get the rubber hood in shot. You may also find minor problems with lenses that lack internal focusing, where, for instance, the front element rotates or where it racks in and out when changing focal length. But in cases like these I found I could usually adapt the mounting position of the ULH to make it work, or, as previously mentioned, stretch it over a lens hood. REMOVING THE HOOD IS JUST AS EASY AS FITTING IT, AND IT RETAINED
You’ll want to avoid touching the front element of your lens as you fit the ULHgo, and this I found easy, though on some lenses it was better to do it with a lens cap in place. After mounting the ULHgo, I was expecting it to be more rigid, but it’s still a little floppy, which actually helps when it’s pressed up against the glass. In use, it performed very well. Though I didn’t have a skyscraper to go up when testing, I tried it in both daylight and night-time conditions, and it definitely removes reflections when used correctly. Because of the floppiness you can adjust your view quite easily, though eventually you will start to see the hood, of course. If handholding the camera, you need to support the hood a little, pressing it on the side opposite side that you’re shooting. If shooting from a tripod, as you’d likely be doing for low-light or time lapse shots, the hood stayed put well, though you can
PROS Affordable, easy to fit, and works very well CONS Fits some lenses better than others when you canmount it to an existing lens hood. It did an excellent job of cutting out reflections, so is well worth having in your bag if you’re likely to be shooting through windows at any moment. have, though it’s definitely more straightforward to use on larger models, or Verdict The ULHgo is an affordable product that works well, and little touches like the anti- static coating raise it above inferior copies. It’ll fit almost any lens you
ITS SHAPE PERFECTLY
IMAGES The lens hood fits easily on to most lenses, and as it's a travel version it folds flat and can be easily stored
30 Photography News | Issue 76
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