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

In this coursework unit, I have learnt a lot about different softwares after using many products relating to technology. I think that things that I have learnt have equipped me in making my music magazine and generally improving my skills that I showcased on the previous task of creating the college magazine.

During the process of preproduction, the very first piece of technology I used was the internet. In order for me to be able to exhibit my work, I had to create an online account on the site – blogger.com. I thought that the whole method of writing posts and publishing them was very easy to do and straightforward but at times I found the process fairly long and at times tedious. For example in order for me to upload certain things like my graphs I had to convert them into a suitable file type which was, at times, very frustrating.  Although this criticism after a while I soon learnt the ways of Blogger and found pleasure in uploading new posts.

The internet also assisted me in my research. Using the search engines for example Google .com and Bing.com, I found numerous images of magazines that would later aid me in creating my own magazine, one of which I used as the example front cover for my textual analysis. As well as using Google to find front covers I also used the internet to find information about publishing companies to help write my case study of a publishing company.

In preproduction I also used some software on the computer to type up my work and present my results. Softwares like Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel made these things accessible allowing me to create my audience research questionnaire and present the results in graphs. As I am very familiar with these programs I did not learn anything new from these softwares.

In order to get images for my media products, I used a Canon E05 400D 10.1 camera to capture my front cover photo. After my first attempt in the preliminary task I was relatively confident using the camera as it was quite easy to operate, however, when it came to the task I learnt that there is a lot more to cameras than just pressing a button.  The first thing I learnt was that in order for the image to be in focus, the correct alignment was needed. This is one of the things I found difficulty with, struggling at times to maintain the focus on my chosen subject.

When taking the pictures I kept in mind the conventions of a magazine that focussed on how to take the images, how to frame the subject and the type of shot needed.  Typically taken at a portrait orientation, I followed this, taken the images at a medium close up shot which I think is big enough and suitable for a front cover. I learnt that in order to achieve maximum results there are three technical elements that are essential to ‘make’ an image. All of these three elements (aperture, shutter speed and ISO speed) contribute to control the amount of light in the picture.

This is where I realised that lighting is an important feature in photography. Taking into consideration the cautions of working with soft-boxes, I learnt the set-up of how the equipment was positioned in the studio and the significance of using a soft-box.

Unfortunately due to my lack of organisation and time management when it came to securing a camera, I had to result in using a mobile phone to take the remainder of the photos seen on the contents page and double page spread. For this I used a Nokia C6 mobile phone, 5 mega pixels. Though in theory the images should be significantly distinctive to the image on the front cover, considering the quality, I found the outcome of these photos relatively good and was quite pleased with them as they are not noticeable for being taken off a camera phone.

After uploading the images from the camera to the computer, I had the task of selecting the ones I wanted for my magazine. Selecting the images was not at all a long process as there were limited amount of pictures available as some were ruled out as they were out of focus or not aligned on the model correctly. Next in order to make the media products I used a program that is renowned for being one of the best graphics editing programs, Adobe Photoshop. I felt fairly confident in creating my vision of my magazine as I was very familiar with this program using numerous times before merely just for leisure. Frequently for the duration of creating the music magazine, I used the ‘Quick Selection’ tool.

This tool enabled me to cut out the appropriate parts of the image that was needed and I think overall gave me a professional look once feathered and blended in to the background. Another tool that I used frequently was the shape tool and the text tool. Overall I think that Photoshop was a very good software and aided me in my creative process.