 Q6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Question 6:   From the process of creating my media product; music magazine, I learnt many technological techniques that helped me to construct my product. To start off my magazine, I had to take pictures of my subject to use on the front cover, contents page and double spread page. I used a Canon E0S 400D Digital to take all the images that would later be used. I also used the Canon for the preliminary task; college magazine. During the preliminary task I struggled to understand how the camera was used as it was my first time using it but when I used it for the main task I learnt things I hadn’t known before to get the desired images needed.

One of the things learnt was how to auto focus, which is to get the red dots on the eyes of the subject to get the shots taken in focus. This was something I didn’t know had to be done when doing my preliminary task and helped effectively when taking the images for the main task.

The location of where the images were taken was in front of a beige colored wall next to a house.  I didn’t change location to keep it consistent and to follow what other real magazines do, which is taking images in the same location.

By using the flash on the camera it helped to create good- quality images as it added brightness even though where the shoot was being taken was quite dark as a result of it being night time.

One of the difficulties I had was that I did not have much experience in taking pictures for a college piece of work so I struggled quite a bit to get a shot of a professional looking image.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 was technology I had also never used before and learnt a lot from it but my Photoshop skills were inadequate to creating my magazine as it was my first time using the program. Photoshop was constructive in helping to create the images taken to get the effect wanted. I adjusted the brightness and contrast to make the images clearer to see.

I learnt how to change images that were not able to upload unto my blog via Blogger through Photoshop. This was done by saving the image as a JPEG file. I also learnt how to make the font used for the texts on the pages of the magazine stand out more by using the layer style options and for most of the fonts, used several of the blending options such as drop shadow, contour, inner shadow, stroke and so on…