Someone on a forum asked what the LH-3 lens hood accessory looks like on the 35mm NOKTON.

Hooded Nokton
San Francisco, California

Nikon D3, Nikkor 85mm f/1.4D, Canon 500D diopter
1/60sec @ ƒ4, ISO560, 85mm

The stuff in the picture

People often ask me what the black thing is on the front of my Leica lenses. The answer is that it is a lens hood. Since you look parallax, and not through-the-lens, Rangefinder lens hoods have cutaways so that less of the viewfinder area is blocked during composition. While the 35mm NOKTON comes with a lens hood (petal style), I much prefer the retro look of the LH-3 accessory hood you can get.

The red sheen coming off the lens surface is not some exaggerated single-coating. It is the reflection at extreme angles caused by a B+W 486 IR cut filter. Since the M8 sensor is susceptible to IR, you need to put on this filter in order for the colors to be correct in-camera. Even though I usually shoot black&white, sometimes I like to recover color from the raw file. An interesting thing to note about this filter is that B&W sells this in four types:

• normal (it’s black)
• chrome (same as above but silver)
• thin (same as above but there is no room to screw in a front filter)
• ultrawide (basically it’s a much larger filter so that the outer screw is much larger. The reason is for ultrawide lenses might have some vignetting otherwise)

I got the chrome version so it matched my lens—a limited edition Cosina-Voigtlander 35mm F1.2 NOKTON.

Because the lens cap for the 35 is a cup type, I have to use the lens cap pirated from my 50mm f/1.8D Nikkor. I should get around to paying $8 for another when I’m near a camera store sometime.

You can also see a Domke F-803 waxwear bag and a Leicatime half case. I like the retro look obviously. 🙂

Unprocessed

You can now mouse over the image to see the pre-processed version. The big trick was to apply Topaz Simplify with a mask to hide the dust on the red filter (which becomes very noticeable in processing).

Keep shooting.