The “Ultimate Lens Hood” seems like a good tool. It is still to be seen if it is stiff enough and/or a bit sticky so as to easily stay in place on the glass surface. It has the potential for being very useful but how easy it will be to handle with different lenses is still to be seen.
I just made my pledge for one ULH at Kickstarter. If you want to get your own, be aware that the campaign is about to end.
An oversized conical bellows of black silicone: the “Ultimate Lens Hood” (ULH).
See my earlier post to learn how I have been managing until now with normal collapsible lens hoods made of rubber. I recently uploaded a gallery of photos from an ongoing project where I am taking photographs through train windows.
My first impression is that the “ultimate lens hood” is not as good as I had hoped. The far edge is too flexible, so holding it from one side it is difficult to keep the whole edge flat on the window as the opposite side does not stay in place. At the lens end, things are not very good, either. The flexible edge needs to be pulled onto the end of the lens, which usually interferes with manual focusing, and not always stays in place. For small-diameter lenses stretching “ultimate lens hood” over a rigid lens hood gives a more usable way of attaching it to a lens. The wall bellow this “near” end is very soft, not properly keeping its shape and causing vignetting with moderate wide-angle lenses. I may attempt to permanently attach the “ultimate lens hood” to a short lens hood (of the screw on metal ones) at one end and add a solid ring to help with holding it against windows. At the moment I am back to using the B+W black rubber lens hoods which are a lot easier to use and carry.
Almost half a year later I saw at AliExpress (under the title “Reflection-free Collapsible Silicone Lens Hood for Camera Mobile Phone Small/Large”) a new development on the same idea but cheaper, so I decided to order the two sizes they offered. They arrived today. They are big, but not excessively so. They are conical, but the back is very broad avoiding vignetting even when tilting wide angle lenses. The wall is stiffer and rarely collapses by accident. Even the solid ring for the front end that I had in mind has been added. The problem of having to stretch the near end over the front of the lens remains. However, I did find a solution to this. In conclusion, this is not a knock-off of the original “ultimate lens hood”. These lens hoods have been redesigned to solve most of the problems I complained about in my comment from last Decemeber. After I get to use this new hood for a couple of window photography sessions I will write a post about them.