So this is revising a previous post, about my quest for a better lens-hood when using a crop-factor camera with lenses made for full-frame. a bit of patience, a 3D printer and a cad file have solved my problem for now.
UPDATE - I now have a very clean new tight lens-hood for the nokton 35mm 1.4 available for sale. Click here to read about the new design
UPDATE: its been about a year since I started playing with 3D printed lens-hoods, I have finally finished and have a regular production of the lens-hood I started out working on, custom made for the Nokton 35mm 1.4, snaps onto the bayonet mount andhave a thinner piece to reduce the foot-print of the hood in the rangefinder. these are available and can be ordered now, email me if you are interested.
The above picture show a handful of raw 3D prints, and a finished black hood mounted on a Voigtlander 35mm 1.4 lens.
orignal post...
Originally I started purchasing lens-hoods one focal length longer than the lens it would be used on, that worked pretty good, but I am not really a big fan of round lens-hoods.
This fall I got my MakerBot CupCake 3D printer put together. My latest project was to design a printable 3D design for my Voightlander 35mm 1.4 - designed as tight as possible for use on my Leica M8, basically when mounted on the M8 the 35mm lens have the field of vision you would expect from a 50mm on a full frame camera.
First step were naturally to create the flange bayonet mount. That was the easy part.
Next I made a VERY large box and started taping black photo-tape on the edges to find out how far I could trim the hood in without causing vignetting.
That resulted in the next prototype, this one with the tight measurements, and a rectangular box hood design. as you can imagine this design covered the viewfinder quite a lot.
So the final prototype got a few more tweaks, I put a camber on the sides (5mm) so the hood present the smallest possible amount of material to the viewfinder.
As you can see the hood blocks very little of the M8's 35mm framelines.
About time, if you ask for my opinion, there are tens of thousands Leica M8 cameras out and around, not to mention the Epson RD1 cameras. all of these are crop factor cameras, and the normal lens-hoods are pretty meaningless as they do not protect the lens enough against stray light, based on the actual amount of field-of-view the camera use on the lens because of the sensor crop-factor.
Seems to me both Leica, Zeiss and Voigtlander could make bit extra money by offering matched hoods for their lenses to be used on their crop-sensor cameras. I want to offer the 35mm 1.4 hood but the printing is a bit slow for high-volume production.
UPDATE: Sep 2010 - I finally managed to finish a really cool new design, and have manage to print these very nicely, the click onto the lens bayonet mount firmly, if you have interest in these hoods email me.
Greetings,
I would like to purchase one of your lens hoods. How do I go about ordering one and payment. I live in Australia.
Cheers
Ric
Posted by: Ric Carlsson | July 27, 2011 at 05:19 AM