As human beings, we perform a lot of day to day to activites and certainly most of them are not well designed. When we first perform something new, we tend to observe the nature of the action and the inconviniences that might be caused in the process. But after repeated action, we start ignoring the subtleties of it. We become numb to these emotions. This is our brain’s way of freeing up mental space so that we can focus on more important things at hand and less on the mundane things. This is a process called habituation. But for a designer, it’s crucial to focus on these things. Find out flaws and figure out ways to make the action more streamlined and intuitive.

While travelling via flights it’s esseantial to have a boarding pass. Normally, you’d ignore the design of it because most of us are so used to it (read: habituated). But after a bit of scrutiny, you’ll notice that they’re a terrible piece of design. Strangely I collected a lot of the boarding passes from my trips over the past few weeks and I began to notice the flaw in the design. To start off, the information was not presented in a clear manner and there was no grouping of related items. This causes a lot of hunting for the information. Often, travellers are tired, stressed, jet-lagged or maybe even first time flyers. The boarding passes should convey the information in a clean and easy to understand fashion.

Let me highlight some of the apparent design flaws in the boarding passes. The desk clerk has to always highlight the key information using a pen at the time of check-in (highlighted in green) to inform the customers where the information is. Instead of doing this, the airlines should make an effort on their part to make sure that this is clearly stated in the first place. In some of the cases the words are almost illegible (highlighted in pink). These are some things that almost everyone can notice. I’m not even discussing the technical aspescts. These passes are a good examples of bad design.

While coming up with a new design, I had to tackle a few constraints that might limit the pass layout (keeping in mind the Indian airports)

• Print constraints. The airports use a thermal printer that limits the colour of the printed text to only black.
• Limit the size of text in order to reduce cost and allow for longer names (city or passengers).
• Have enough whitespace in the centre for the security stamp (most common place). These always ends up covering some information on the pass. (See the Vistara pass for example. You have to really strain yourself to find the seat and boarding time)
• Consider the different people who might need to refer to the boarding pass apart from the traveller
• Inlcude essentials like barcode and safety messages.
• Limit myself to lighter tones in order to make it easy to read text.

I had to choose an airline for my design mockup. I decided to go with Vistara as it had easily the worst designed boarding pass and also partly becasue it’s my favourite airline in the country (love the food they give ❤). I adopted the company’s colour palette to maintain the brand identity and make it easier for people to recognise it. I tried to use the colours smartly to maintain a good amount of contrast between the various elements

I separated the information in three clear distinct areas. I read an amazing piece about the same by Adam Glynn-Finnegan, a designer with Airbnb. I went with a slightly differnt approach with the layout though.

1 This contains all the information regarding to the flight. The traveller has to refer to this most frequently. There’s a contrast between this area and the rest of the pass to highlight the same

2 Details regarding the passenger are given here. The passenger doesn’t have to refer to this frequently and is given a lesser priority.

3 This is the general information regarding the travel and boarding. This area is separated from the #2 with a good amount of whitespace for the security stamp.

With millions of people travelling everyday and using this essential item, it is important that they are well designed. I feel that the whole aiport experience has not changed a lot in the past decade. Sure there have been small improvements such as web check-ins and or have the tickets on your phones. But fundamentally it’s still very much the same thing. You still have to spend a good 60 minutes of your time atleast before you actually fly. I would really like to see some major changes to the whole process in the future. Till then all we can do is to try and make the current one a bit more convinient.

I’ve been using my trusty old Nikon 35mm f/1.8 G prime for about two odd years now. It has helped me gain a ton of experience in shooting and helped me to learn to adapt to different shooting conditions maybe because of its inherent limitation of a fixed focal length. Apart from its one short coming, a prime lens has all the things you’d want from a good piece of glass: sharpness, large aperture, amazing bokeh, good colour reproduction and a compact size for portability. So after two years of shooting with the same lens I seriously considered getting myself a new lens to make my shooting a bit more versatile and to grow myself as a photographer. After a bit of hunting on eBay for some cheap second hand lenses, I short listed three lenses: a Sigma 24–70mm f/3.5–5.6, a Sigma 28–135mm f/3.8–5.6 and finally a Nikon 28–105mm f/3.5–4.5 D. After looking at all the three lenses and comparing their performances, the Nikon 28–105mm was clearly far superior to the two Sigmas with the added bonus of a Macro functionality. So the choice was clear. I bought the Nikon and now you’re reading the review.

Specifications and Handling

This a pretty old lens. Originally manufactured in 1999 (I’m feeling old suddenly). It has a plastic body with nice rubber rings for the zoom and focus ring. Do note that focus ring travel is very less. Barely an inch of travel which makes it kind of tough to nail that exact focus. The lens has an aperture ring too which is a great thing to have if you’re a videographer. The lens has no bulit-in focus motor so make sure your camera has one otherwise goodluck with the manual focusing. The zoom ring is pretty tight for the inital few focal lengths (say from 28–45mm) and then progressively smoothens out. It’s kind of peculiar and might cause jerking while zooming in and out making precise framing hard. But then again it might be problem with my lens.

Sharpness

The range of image sharpness for a lens usually varies a lot from the difference focal lengths and aperture opening. So for a cheap lens you can expect the performance to vary significantly (that’s why the hate for the kit lenses) but whereas for the higher end lenses, the companies make sure that the user gets a better range of peak image quality. Hence the higher price tag.

I decided to gauge the performance at three focal length settings (28mm, 70mm and 105mm) and three aperture openings (maximum, f/8 and the minimum). Normally reviewers resort to the fancy DxOMark for the best representation for the sharpness for a lens but I’m making do with a simple image comparison. Please excuse me.

At 28mm, the widest the lens can go, the image shaprness is good and improves progressively after f/4.5 to around f/11. Beyond that there’s again a noticable drop in sharpness.

At 70mm, the image sharpness is excellent at the centre and as you stop down beyond f/8, it only gets better to around f/16 and then thesharpness again takes a dive. So if you want the best sharpness throughout the frame, go for f/11 or around that.

At 105mm, the lens continues to offer excellent sharpness after stopping down to say around f/9.

Vignetting

All the photos were taken on a crop sensor camera so the vignetting is not as strong as it might have been on afull frame sensor camera. To test the vignetting of a lens, the idea is simple. Just shoot a blank evenly lit surface and observe. You’ll notice some amount of vignetting in most lenses wide open. But nothing so serious that you can’t fix it in post.

Here, the vignetting is strong only in case of 28mm focal lenght at f/3.5 and after that it’s not much of issue and won’t disturb most shooting conditons unless you only shoot blank surfaces. Once stopped down, the performance is much better and even at all the focal lengths

Bokeh

One of the most sought after feature in a lens is its ability to separate the background from the subject and isolate it. This helps you to get that dreamy and blurry background in your shots which some say is the easiest way to rack up your Like count on Facebook. So if you’ve ever observed a shot with a very shallow depth of field, you’ll notice the light and objects tend to appear as circular balls. The quality of this blur is called Bokeh. An easy way to gauge this performance is by seeing the bokeh and its smoothness.

The lens has 9 aperture blades which most certainly guarantees you nice and circular out of focus highlights. At 35mm, the blur is smooth and without much distrotion. The same can be said about the quality at 70mm. But once you reach the max focal length, 105mm, the bokeh balls take a dip in quality with the inside not being smooth enough and the edges clearly pronounced.

Macro

This is where things get really interesting. Macro. This was the first time I dabbled around with macro photography. I found it really interesting and has opened more ways in which I can shoot. The lens has the macro option only between 50mm-105mm range which is very odd. To engage the lens in and out of macro mode, one has to perform a very complex ritual every time. Keep the focus beyong 0.5 m, zoom beyond 50 mm, flip focus limiter switch to macro and then bring the focus under 0.5m. To go out macro, repeat the same steps in reverse. Good luck learning that.

The lens normally has a minimum focus distance of about 0.3m. But once in the macro mode, the lens can let you focus on objects upto 5cm close and producing a magnification of about 1:2. The macro performance is great in the centre region but looses out on some shaprness in the corners and edges.

Comparison with 35mm f/1.8G

I didn’t really have a benchmark to compare this lens with so I decided to see how it stacks up against a prime lens. The best in terms of image quality. For this I chose a Nikon 35mm f/1.8 G lens. So it might not be the best but it certainly offers you the best bang for your buck at its price point.

I took two test shots while keeping the 28–105mm lens at 35mm. I also tried to choose similar aperture for both the lenses while taking the shots. The results came out as expected. The prime clearly performed better. Producing a sharper and more contrasty image. Colour reproduction seems to be similar in both the lenses. I should have compared the lenses in more conditions but I think this gives a rough idea about the performance gap

Final Words

So I did not subjectively grade this lens for each aspect that I reviewed but if I had to, I’ll give it an overall score of 7.5 on 10. I’m happy with the image quality of this lens. My complaints are only about the build quality and its performance at 28mm wide open. The latter can be fixed by stopping down a few stops to get the best results. Nothing can be done about the build quality though. It doesn’t feel cheap to extent of breaking at the slightest knock or tumble but it also doesn’t feel solidly built with excellent mechanics. The lens is compatible with FX cameras which makes it very tempting purchase at the current price (I got it for around ₹7000 / $110). This lens is not made anymore and most probably you can’t buy a new one. Don’t feel cheated about the fact that you read a review of a lens which is not in production anymore. There still a great number of used lenses available on the internet. Go buy some.

If you want to freeze a moment in time you resort to taking a photo. But what if you want to capture a series of events? Thanks to a bloke named Louis Le Prince who invented the film camera, that’s now possible. Even though you can capture a lot of moments using either of the two mediums, both are not sufficient to showcase something larger and grander. Maybe an event that takes place over hours, days, weeks or maybe even months! Time lapses exist to serve this very purpose. Super long events can be shown very conveniently over a few seconds. Yay!

The underlying idea behind a time lapse is fairly simple. You might have heard ofterms like 24 fps, 30 fps or maybe 60 fps in the context of a video. What it basically means is that one second of film usually has 24 or 30 images (or frames) per second of video. So a video in reality is actually a series of images changing very fast. Fast enough to fool the human eye at least. Now imagine you want to capture a sunrise. This would typically take about 30–45 mins. You don’t want to show someone a video of sunrise for that long. It would be like staring at a clock. You can resort to taking a time lapse. So a 30 min event can be condensed into a 10–30 second. that would make it way more dramatic and more of a spectacle to watch. Remember shooting a time lapse takes quite a bit of effort but modern phones have a come a long way and have made it fairly easy for one to shoot a time lapse with just a tap on the screen and without bogging down the user with too many options. But still there’s no substitute for patience. You have to wait for long durations to finish a time lapse. Good luck finding out a way around that problem.

Recently I was in Guwahati, India (my home town ❤) for a couple of days. The weather over there was just amazing! By the evening the cloud cover over the city just looked heavenly. I thought it would be a good idea to finally shoot a time lapse during the golden hours (dusk or dawn). I have tried shooting a time lapse multiple times in the past but never got down to actually processing one mostly because I was lazy or maybe didn’t really capture a lot of motion in them. I have just way to many folders on my PC with photos that I shot for a time lapse just lying there.

One fine evening I took out my trusty old Nikon D200 and got down to shoot a time lapse. I was determined this time. Off to the terrace. First step is to calculate the duration and number of shots that you need. I have very little patience (I’m working on it) and decided that I can’t sit for too long alone staring at the setting sun. So I set a time frame of about fifteen minutes. So that’s around 900 seconds. This had to be made into a 6–7 seconds shot. This means I have to shoot 30*7=210 shots over 900 seconds. This comes to around a difference of 4 seconds between each shot. Easy. I set up my camera to shoot in RAW at f/9 and ISO 100. I kept the camera in Aperture priority so that it can continuously meter and adjust the exposure automatically. This method causes a lot of flickering but then we can fix it post. I used a fairly small aperture so that the exposures are kinda long and adds a bit of motion to the shot. You don’t want it to look jittery. To shoot a time lapse using your camera you need an external intervalometer or a built in one in your camera. Most new cameras have it built in. I have a built in one and so I set it up to shoot 200 shots (around 6 seconds) at a four second interval.

I was done with the shooting and waited for about 2 weeks before I finally gathered the vigour to get on with the time lapse making process. I used a software called LRTimelapse 3. It’s a brilliant software that makes it super easy to batch edit your photos before you convert them to video. I learnt how to get a smooth transition between the images using a very handy tutorial I found on YouTube. In a nutshell it reuqires you to setup a few key frames which would be taken as the reference for the exposure transistion from image to image. Once you have done this, the images are exported to Lightroom where you can edit these key frames for the right look. Then you switchback to LRTimlapse and let the software calculate the exposures for each image and sync the metadata to the images. Back to Lightroom. Now all you have to do now is reload the metadata and export the images. Sit back and relax. This takes a while.

Time to take out the big guns. Adobe After Effects. Once all the photos have been exported as JPEGs with the adjusted exposure and settings we can start making the video. In After Effects, I chose the standard 1080p resolution at 30 fps and started off with my composition. I loaded all the adjusted photo and made a composition. There are these two options called Motion Blur and Frame Blending. I used these to smoothen the transistion between two frames. Time to export. After exporting the video, I used HandBrake, a nifty software for video conversion. I had to convert the original file from AVI (size was over 1 GB) to a MP4 format. This also resuced the size to about 2 MB making it easier for me to upload the file on YouTube. The final result is quite pleasing.

I have a camera and I shoot sometimes. Yesterday I decided to do some product photography. I had a couple of things to start off with but I chose my phone as the subject (it’s fairly small and I can experiment more with it). It’s an aging iPhone 5. It’s pretty old but still one of the best designed phones out there. Who doesn’t want a pretty model, right?

Setup

For shooting I used a Nikon D200 as my camera. For the lens, I decided to go with my trusty 35mm prime: the Nikon 35mm F/1.8 AF-S. I have a study table at my place which has a very pretty baby blue surface. I decided to use it as the surface on which I’ll shoot. I didn’t have any source of natural light as I was shooting at night so I used an off camera flash. It’s an el cheapo Digitek Flash. Very basic. No fancy options. I used a home made soft box that was carefully engineered using a cutter and scotch tape. It was made using a cardboard box and some butter paper. The camera was mounted on the tripod and the flash was on the surface next to the phone. Also to trigger the off camera flash, one needs some kind of trigger. You can either use one those fancy wireless ones or use the on-camera flash (Master) to trigger the off-camera flash (Slave). I used the later option and for a reflector, I used a piece of cardboard. My editing machine is a 4-year old HP Envy 4. The laptop has ample power to edit photos without struggling but the screen is terrible. The colours are way off their actual values and the screen has basically zero contrast. It seems like HP lacks a colour calibration department. You might have figured out by now that I’m a photographer on a very tight budget.

Shooting

Clicking photos in natural light is rather straight forward and there’s not much you can do about the light conditions unless you have a remote for the Sun. Whereas with the flash, you have to fiddle around with the settings on the camera and the flash to get the look you want especially when you don’t have a light meter. Since I was shooting the phone on a surface, I didn’t really have to worry about the depth of field and I could choose between multiple apertures to get the exposure just about right without changing my ISO. Shutter speed doesn’t affect the flash intensity (primary light source) so you can’t really factor in that while controlling the exposure in these conditions. My flash has on 1/8th power all the time. It might seem a lot but the soft box really takes away a lot of the intensity from flash. Once I had my exposure right, I played around with the position of the flash to get the lighting I wanted. I wanted a spotlight-ish effect on the phone. The look I initially achieved in the camera wasn’t great but then again you can always fix it in post.

The light doesn’t do much to highlight the phone so I had to fix this later using Photoshop. First I fixed the photo a little bit using Lightroom to curb the shadows, make the highlights brighter and remove a slightly purplish hue from the back of the phone. I didn’t spend too much time in Lightroom as most of my work was going to be done in Photoshop.

Next I edited the photo in Photoshop. The good thing in Photoshop is that I can create multiple layers and focus more on localized editing. I also get more options to manipulate the photo to fix a lot of blemishes from the photo.

I started off by fixing the the Apple logo as it was ridden with fingerprints. I created a quick selection and painted the area black and then adjusted the opacity till the black paint wasn’t too overpowering. Once I had that sorted, next thing was to give the surface a nice look. I used a method called Frequency Separation to really highlight the metallic texture of the phones’ back and the grainy feel of the cover. The camera module has a metallic ring around it. I really wanted it to shine and stand out against the black glass piece. I played around with Dodge and Burn until I got the ring nice and shiny. I have used this phone for quite some time without a case so the phone has a few nicks and scratches on it. I used the Spot Healing Brush tool to fix these. Pretty basic stuff.

But it didn’t end there. There were still a few things that were bothering me. The black glass piece at the bottom of the phone was too dirty. Something had to be done about that. I fixed that by duplicating that glass bit, applying a Gaussian Blur on it and pasting it back. Not full proof but I does the job. The table had to be also fixed as it had far too many scratches on the surface. Once again it was the job for the Spot Healing Brush. Now the blue of the surface wasn’t contrasty enough. I created a mask around the table and made a new Adjustment Layer to fix the blues using Hue/Saturation option.

Remember the spotlight effect I was trying to achieve? I did that by creating a vignette using the Gradient tool from black-to-transparent. It was not dead in the center but slightly offset to match the phones’ position. This finishes the image. It doesn’t look vastly different from original but has the right amount of tweaks that gives it a slightly more polished look.

Sometime midway of my shoot, my sister noticed me clicking photos of my phone. She suggested it’d be a good idea if I paired my phone with hers. She has a gold iPhone 6. I did a simple shot to see how the phone looked against the surface. I was very happy with what I saw.The image of the gold phone with the blue surface had a really nice contrast to it. So I included my phoone and tried a few positions with both the phones. I got a few nice clicks. Now on to the computer.

Now again I went through all the above mentioned process of removing the blemishes, fixing the colour, enhancing the texture, Dodging and Burning, adjusting the Highlights and the Shadows, making the vignette and then finally cropping the image a bit to give it the wide aspect ratio. This is the final image that I got.

P.S. I’m really happy with both my results. I did a few more shots and edited them but I felt that none of them were good enough for the internet. I’m by no means as good as a professional but I do my best. My work might be a bit sloppy. My methods a bit rudimentary. But all of us have our humble beginning. Well, this is mine.

While casually browsing through the AppStore I came across this very eccentric and minimalist looking app icon which resembled a butt. This immediately got my attention. The app was named “Blek”. After opening the app page and seeing the trailer for the game I was in love with the concept of the game and didn’t think twice before buying the game.

The game is developed by two brothers Denis and Davor Mikan. In a world full of puzzle games that go about plagiarizing each others’ work, Blek is pleasant departure from the traditional lot of puzzlers. The concept is fairly simple (but the levels aren’t) and involves the players doodling around the screen and watching their doodles repeat their pattern and take out all the dots in the process. The initial few levels do a good job at helping you acclimatize to the game. The design is very clean and it doesn’t take long to understand the game and its mechanics. The most magical thing about the game is that it not only repeats your strokes but it also captures the speed at which you make them making the whole thing feel alive. There’s plenty of room to play around with different patterns and watching them take out all the dots with almost childlike excitement. The game has no background music per se but there these each time complete a action like collecting a dot or finishing a level, the game makes a “whoosh” or “chime” sound. The absence of an annoying timer and point system gives it almost a Zen like feel. This helps the players to complete each level at their own pace without feeling as if they are losing out on some reward or achievement.

The difficulty increases pretty linearly over the 80 odd levels and as you progress in the game, there are new elements added which not only make more challenging but also keep things fresh. There are no aids or hints to help you with the solution, so you’re own your own. As the amount of white space decreases on the screen, your room for error decreases too and you have to be very precise about your strokes. Most levels will require multiple attempts as the solution is not straight forward. Each successive solution will require you to adjust your strokes a wee bit here and there and continuously refine it till you finally get it right. This is one of those moment when I wished I had opted for a phone with a bigger screen. Sigh. As the amount of freedom you have to draw keeps on decreasing, the game forces you to think for new approaches and it rewards you when you do so. There’s something oddly satisfying about a random doodle take out ten dots in succession. There’s nice feature precisely for such moments that lets you save the picture of your approach and share it online.

This is a fun little game that will surely keep you busy for a few hours, let you explore your creativity and make you look cool while doing all of this. Blek has sold over 1.5 million copies and was initially iOS exclusive but now it’s available on the Play Store for Android too. The game has been the recipient of multiple awards including the coveted Apple Design Awards 2014. This game falls in the ranks of other great mobile games like Monument Valley, Tiny Wings, Leo’s Fortune and Shadowmatic just to name a few. This is one of those rare games that proves that beautiful things don’t have to be painted on canvas and really shows developers not merely as geeks but true artists.

Rating: 9/10