Evaluation Question 6 - What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

During this coursework, I have learnt many different ways and things on how to use the software of certain technologies. I think by learning all these new skills it has equipped me to make my music magazine and also has improved my skills as you will be able to see if you compare my college magazine to my music magazine.

During the long process of planning, the very first piece of technology I used was the internet as I needed to create an account on Blogger.com to present my work. The process of posting and writing your work on blogger was very useful at times but became fairly difficult to keep up with work and remembering to post every single piece of work that you do on blogger. Also when it came to upload photos and graphs it became frustrating because you would need to convert them in suitable file content which annoyed me at certain times. After getting use to blogger it became quicker and easier to use.

Also when using the internet another factor that assisted me in my work was using search engines such as Google to find images and research on existing magazines so it made it easier to plan and also I used an image of a magazine to write my magazine front cover analysis. It also helped me find information about publishing companies to help me write my case study.

In my planning I also used software such as Microsoft excel to create spread sheets to create my graphs and pie charts to present my data that I got from my audience research questionnaires but sadly I didn’t learn anything new with excel since I have been using it for some time.

In order to obtain my images for my media product, I used the Canon E05 400D 10.1 camera and also the Cannon E05 500D which was my own camera to capture the images for my front cover, contents page and double page spread. After the first attempt using the camera provided by the teacher it was relatively easy since we could take photos anywhere we wanted to. However when it came to using the blue room and the other pieces of equipment I found it harder to use because some photos became out of focus when taken because I didn’t know how to use the camera. The first thing I learnt was how to put the camera into focus which helped me a lot since then my pictures came out much clearer. To make sure it is in focus is to press the button on the top right of the camera so the red dot moves around till you get it to eye level which will put it in focus.

When taking the photos I had to consider many things such as conventions of the magazine and what type of shot should the photo or if it should be portrait or landscape.  When I took my photos, I took most of them in portrait orientation, then I took a few in medium close ups for my front cove of the magazine then I experimented with close ups and long shots and used these images in different parts of my full product. I also learnt how to achieve maximum results with three technical elements that make a photo, and the three elements are (aperture, shutter speed and ISO speed) and these control how much light is let into the camera.

When using the Cannon E05 400D, another problem occurred with the lighting because I wasn’t using the soft box well enough, the model stood to far back and some pictures came out really dark.

Once the pictures were uploaded on to the computer, I now had to pick which ones would be most suitable for my magazine.  Then once selecting the image, now I would need to open that image on a photo editing software, the software I used to edit my pictures was Photoshop CS5. This allowed changing the brightness and contrast of the picture to make it suitable for the magazine. By using Photoshop I was in my comfort zone since I have worked with it before and knew how to edit the pictures. The first thing I did once the image was on Photoshop was that I used the pen tool to cut out the image from the background and this was very time consuming, so later on I decided to use the quick selection tool to cut the images out.

Magic wand tool     

The pen tool

  Once completely cutting the image from the background it gave a me a final result which allowed to add to my magazine. Overall I think that Photoshop Is a great editing software.