Make Your Own Printable Lens Hood

Lens hoods are ridiculously expensive considering the fact that they’re simply fancy plastic tubes. If you’d like to use a lens hood but don’t feel like shelling out wads of cash, you can create your own cardboard lens hoods!

First, a disclaimer: The resulting lens hood may not make your camera look more impressive, and may not be as effective as the real thing.

lenshoods.co.uk and lenshoods.net are two nearly identical websites that offer printable lens hood templates for a huge list of lenses. Here’s what the templates look like:

The only difference with lenshoods.net is that it offers hoods that are “optimized” for crop sensor cameras.

All you need to do is print out the template (on A4, A3, or A2 paper), cut it out of black card stock, and assemble it with tape or glue.

If you’d like to have a unique looking hood for your lens, you can also design your own custom lens hood.