Lens Hood Question

[Runmonty]

I would love to get thoughts of the forum members about the use of lens hoods.

To put my question into perspective, I recently saw a discussion on the web where someone ridiculed a “newbie” photographer for using their lens hood backwards. The subsequent discussion included claims that using a lens hood is the single most important thing you can do to improve your photography and that it will significantly improve all shots, even if lens flare is no consideration. Comments were made about the engineering that goes into their design to make them an integral part of the precision optics of the lens. Now I may have paraphrased slightly, but the general idea was that lens hoods should always be used and will provide far superior images in all situations, by limiting extraneous light.

Personally I will confess to not religiously using them. Firstly the only hoods I have are for my “L” lenses and not any others. I store my lenses with the hood reversed and like the “newbie” I can be seen on occasions to leave it this way when shooting. I always use them when shooting into the light or if it is glary with a lot of reflected light. I tend not to use them if I want to be less conspicuous (recently when I used the lens hood on my telephoto zoom my son asked if I was compensating for something) . Other times I am indifferent, sometimes I do - sometimes I don’t.

I have no doubt about their use in reducing lens flare, but I am wondering if I should be more vigilant about using them in general use and would appreciate others thoughts on the subject.