What have you learned about technologies from the process of construction of the product?

What have you learned about technologies from the process of construction of the product?

The main form of technology I have used to create my magazine is Adobe Photoshop. This piece of software has allowed me to create a realistic magazine opposed to that of one created in basic software such as paint. This is because it is one form of software that is used by actual magazine companies to put their magazines together. By using Photoshop there is an endless range of features available to me. A key aspect is being able to cut an image out allowing me to use it in all different forms throughout my magazine. The picture effects I have used with brightness and black and white are a lot more detailed by using Photoshop. This has allowed me to give the images in my magazine fantastic effects that can be used to capture the interest of my audience. One of the most important aspects of Photoshop in creating a magazine is using text wrapping which allows the text to be wrapped around the picture in columns and fill all the available space to use. This allowed me to avoid having unappealing blank spaces and appear professional as a real music magazine would.  A useful piece of technology I have benefited from is Youtube. By being such a large video hosting site I easily found tutorials on how to create special effects on Photoshop that I would have never been able to do without watching. Even though allot of these effects didn’t make it into my final edition of my magazine they have still been greatly beneficial for future use. It has also been a very useful way in which I have hosted my own tutorials that I have created for my blog. Blogger and its simple interface have made it very simple to allow me to create a professional portfolio of my work. It also allows me to share my work with peers and get it easily and quickly marked with helpful feedback from a teacher. By being publicly open this has allowed me to see my peers work throughout the process. I find this is a key resource for inspiration and motivation when it comes to creating an effective magazine. Other popular sites such as Google and Wikipedia have allowed the way in which I conducted preliminary research to be simple and effective. A simple piece of hardware in my webcam has allowed blogging about my progress throughout the course to be so much simpler by filming myself directly in video blogs instead of doing countless text blogs. This has allowed the range of media displayed on my blog to vary and keeping it interesting and demonstrating my abilities in different aspects of media. Another really useful piece of software that allowed me to make some effective videos especially tutorials and explaining how I managed certain things on the computer is Cam-studio. In order to edit my videos and create a final piece I used Adobe Premier CS3. This software is a lot more detailed and specific than basic programmes I had used before such as Windows Movie Maker. It allowed me to brighten video which was very useful for one such incident in which my footage had came out overly dark. I was also able to over lay other videos, pictures and sound. Overall it allowed my work to appear allot more professional and also once I had learnt the basics was reasonably simple to use. I hosted allot of my PowerPoint, Word and PDF documents using an online site called scribd.com. This enabled them to be saved online and embedded into blogger simply with an effective appearance. Although PowerPoint is a very useful tool for all presentations another online programme I used was Prezi. It is also a presentation device but with a very different concept. Instead of multiple slides it is one canvas which all information is displayed on with paths used to jump from part to part. This gave a professional appearance and also excitement which once was another boring presentation. However to me the most important piece of technology towards my progress in the project is in my opinion the camera I used to take all my pictures. The camera I chose was a Canon 550D DSLR which is my preferred type thanks to its simple interface and reliability compared to other branded cameras such as Nikon. By being digital straight away this gave me an advantage over past students who would have had to use a film camera. Whereas instead of being able to take as many photos as I wanted and check them on the spot, I would have had to buy a film with a about maximum of 20 photos on that I wouldn’t of been able to see until after they were developed. After this I would have had to scan them into a computer making the whole task a lot more time consuming and expensive. Having bypassed this problem by simply using a digital camera I was able to have full control over my photos. I conducted three different photo shoots one being in a studio and two being on location. Starting with my location I set up a white back drop light by Interfit portrait photography lighting. By having trigger lighting on this brought the lighting on only when I took the photo giving a professional look and effect to my photos. For this shoot I used an 18-55mm 4.6 aperture lens which enabled detailed photos and I wide range of possible angles to access. Next I set up an identical camera on a tripod focused on the set. I then hooked this up with an intervalmeter which enabled me to create a time lapse of my whole photo shoot. However for my location shoots I used a 50mm 1.8 aperture lens with polarising filter. This lowered aperture cause the camera to only focus on the model in the foreground giving a blurred effect upon the background. This caused these photos to look my most professional and really boosting the overall outcome of my magazine.