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

The following are the images which I took for my music magazine. I have only included the ones which I used in my final product.

Features page images

 

 

Contents page

Front cover

The most obvious use of technology throughout the creation of my music magazine is that of a camera. We used a simple digital camera in order to take the images. We decided against using other, related equipment such as a tripod, predominantly for the reason that we wanted to experiment with taking the images from different angles. Tripods are used in order to create a stiller image, and therefore had we chosen to use one we may have created images which were more professional looking. However, using a tripod may have inhibited our ability to experiment with various camera angles and shot lengths; for example - especially during the shoot for the images of our contents page - we often took the images from on the ground or from a height, in order to create some variation in our images. Had we tried to use a tripod, we could not necessarily have achieved these variations, and though this may have made our photos look more professional, they may not have been as visually interesting.

In terms of software used to edit my images, I have learned a lot from the programmes I have used to do so. I used Microsoft Publisher in order to create my magazine, and used programmes including Paint and Windows Photo Gallery in order to edit them. We decided that we wanted the images in our music magazine to show some of the brand identity of the magazine; we wanted to put each photo in black and white and highlight one item as purple in order to convey the house colours of the magazine. I used Photo Gallery in order to do this; I changed the colour of the photo to Sepia, also altering the contrast so that the images were clearer and more professional looking. Creating another layer on the image, I changed the transparency of this image, selected an item and then chose the colour of the image on this second layer. The most obvous example of this in my magazine is on the contents page, where I have edited the model's shoes to be of a clearer and more exaggerated purple colour.

I have also used various programmes through the internet in order to move forward with the production of my music magazine. I regularly use the social networking site Facebook in order to interact with my friends, but until this project I had never used sites such as Slideshare, SurveyMonkey or even Blogger! I have, by using these sites, expanded my knowledge of not only these individual sites but also of the vast opportunities available on the internet. The site which I have learned the most from is arguably SurveyMonkey. The ability to not only create and customise your own personal survey, but also to chose how to distribute and analyse it has been very useful to me personally, and I intend to use my account often!

We did not really experiment much with lighting equipment in our photos, as we thought carefully about the settings for the images and generally altered the contrast and brightness of the images after they were taken if necessary. However, in the photos for our contents page we thought more carefully about the lighting equipment that we used; we put two spotlights onto a black background and saw that this created an interesting shadow effect. When we took the flash off the camera we were using, this created the perfect lighting for our image, with the shadow from the light cast onto the white floor that the model lay on. This helped me to more carefully consider not only lighting, but the effects of the lighting on the backgrounds featured in photographs.