Evaluation question 6

Question 6: what have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

From the process of constructing my final product I have learnt a lot about technology that helped me improve and construct my magazine. The first thing I learnt in the process of constructing my magazine was how to use a Canon E0S 400D camera to take pictures of my models for my magazine. Though i used the same camera for my preliminary task i didn’t know how to create the image i wanted but in the process of creating my final product i learnt how to do it. I used long shot photos so I could fit all my models in and also so that once I put it on Photoshop I would be allowed to crop unnecessary things that I did not wanted. 

Another useful technology I learnt is the use of Photoshop, before i created my tasks my knowledge of Photoshop was very little but through progression it has improved a lot. I used Photoshop CS5 to create my music magazine, this is because it had more features then cs3 and I found it much easier to control my images and the layers. I used many different tools to construct my magazine, one tool I used was the Polygonal Lasso tool so that I could select my model and could make the contrast brighter or darker without having to change the contrast of the background. I also used the patch tool to make one part of my background the same colour as the other so my magazine would look better.

Another technology I used was the internet. I was told to create a blogger account to submit all my media coursework in and it recorded the time you posted your work also. To upload images onto blogger.com I would have to save the image as a JPEG file before attempting to upload it. I found many problems using this website for example, sometimes when I would copy and paste the text into the new post box and then publish it, there would be a white background covering my writing which didn’t allow the text to appear. Another problem was when trying to arrange the images into your desired position, when uploading a larger picture it was very difficult to place it next to a smaller picture that you have already uploaded in the new post box though there was space for it to go there. Another problem was that the formats of the text would change when you previewed the post before you published it. However through the process of using blogger I overcame all of these issues and published my work in an organised fashion.

Another technology I used was google.com. I used google.com to research everything I needed to know about magazines e.g. the conventions used in a real magazine; how a real magazine design was laid out and what sort of topics magazines discuss. I also used Google images to get magazine front cover images for my textual analysis. I also used Wikipedia.org as it has a very detailed explanation of the thing you want to research about and to research about companies that published the magazine that I wanted to distribute my magazine to for question 3.

I used Microsoft software’s such as Microsoft word 2010 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2007. I used Microsoft word 2010 to write up all my written tasks such as textual analysis and to use its spell-checker so my grammar was correct. I used Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 to upload the screen munchies of my audience research so I could organise it in a way that I wanted to and to save it as a JPEG so I could upload it onto Blogger.