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Lens hoods are a neat little piece of equipment. They do make your camera look professional and cool, but they also serve a great little purpose: reducing lens flare. Not sure what lens flare is? If you've ever taken a photograph into the sun, and gotten these little floating specks from the sunlight, then you've seen lens flare. You can often see these floating orbs in movies when they are filming a sunset. For some photos, lens flare is simply part of the image, a wacky side effect that they like to have in their images. There are some photographers that purposely photograph into the sun to get the lens flare in their images. For those times when lens flare is any annoying effect that you would rather have removed, you can use something simple like a lens hood to reduce and completely remove lens flare from your images.