Why you want the lens hood on all the time

Most lenses are shipped with a dedicated hood. Its purpose is to diminish lens flare. Lens flare is caused by light rays hitting the lens elements diagonally. As a result, the shape of these elements appears in the final image. Sometimes lens flare is no so obvious; you may not see such shapes into the image, but you get a low contrast image. Because of their design, ultra wide angle lenses are prone to lens flare more than other lenses. It’s very difficult (almost impossible) to shoot into the sun with a wide angle lens and not to get lens flare. Sometimes you can use this “effect” creatively (in fact, Photoshop has a filter to add lens flare in post-processing), but most of the time you want to avoid it.

So what you can do to avoid lens flare?

1. Keep the lens hood on all the time, even in situations where no intense light is present. I see many photographers taking pictures with the lens hood reversed in storage position. I can’t believe you are so lazy to do so. It’s the best thing you can to do to decrease the contrast of your images! The only time when you want to remove the lens hood is when you are going to use your camera’s pop-up flash. Pop-up flashes are located just above the lens, so when they fire the lens hood causes a shade that is present in the final image.

2. If lens hood is not enough you can further up use your hands, cap or whatever you have available to block light rays from reaching the lens diagonally.

3. Avoid shooting directly into the sun/ light source or at near angles, especially if you are using a wide angle lens.
     

Shooting food & sweets

Here are some small tips for shooting food & sweets:

1.            Shoot from a low angle: by shooting from above it makes your images look like snapshots. 

2.            Use a macro lens which reveals detail and texture and allows for small working distances (the above shots were taken with a Nikkor 105mm 2.8 macro lens, except the image of the hotel hall which was taken with a Nikkor 14-24mm 2.8 wide-angle lens). 

3.            Overexpose by 2/3 or even a full stop, according to the subject. As a result, your subjects will look fresh and delicious. 

4.            Use a swallow depth-of-field. Your images will look more pleasing and professional, but please note that if you are using a macro lens you have to close down (to f8 or f11) in order to get a sufficient depth-of-field. If you are working handheld and using a wide aperture (e.g. 2.8) it’s very easy to get out-of-focus images. 

5.            Use directional light with off-camera flashes, softboxes/ umbrellas and reflectors. If you have to use on-camera flash, point its head to the ceiling (The above shots were taken at a recent wedding. I didn’t have the opportunity and time to use off-camera flash, so I used an on-camera SB900). 

6.            In post-processing, use strong contrast, to make colors come to life.

Basic Lighting Setup

Here is a basic lighting setup for outdoors portraiture images:

1.            Set your camera to Manual Mode and underexpose the background for about 1 
                stop

2.            Use the sun as a backlight (if there is no sun available, place a speedlight on a tripod and point it on the subject’s hair)  

3.            Set up a speedlight in a softbox (for smooth lighting) and place it at 45 degrees angle high and above from your subject (if you don’t have a softbox you can use an umbrella or a diffuser)

4.            Control your speedlight(s) via the pop-up flash of your camera (if you don’t have a pop-up flash you can use the SU800 IR transmitter, another speedlight, pocket wizards, or cords)   

The above image was taken to a local park by using the sun, an SB900 attached on a softbox and an SU800 on a D3s.