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

Through out the making of my magazine I have had to use various pieces of software and technologies.

I created my front cover using Adobe Photoshop which is quite a complex piece of software and one which took a fair bit of getting use to as there's lots which can be achieved through using Photoshop.

The basics you can achieve in Photoshop are cropping and editing images, layering and putting text onto the page and picture.

But as well as the basics, Photoshop offers a wide and extensive range of effects that you can apply to your work, which means that amateurs can produce material that looks professional. There are various tools you can use such as opacity levels, where the image is faded. I used this tool in my magazine on the double page spread, on the picture below.

The original picture

Picture with a lower opacity.

As well as the opacity there are tools to edited colours, fonts, shadows and other editing skills.

With these tools I have been able to create a magazine front cover which looks professional. I have been able to add pictures and texts and trial out fonts easily using this technology and without the use of this I would have to cut out images, draw out fonts and then stick them on paper, where the over all finished product wouldn't look as professional or neat. So thanks to the technologies available to us now I have been able to explore a lot more and develop my idea's for my magazine and make these idea's real and include them.

Whilst making my magazine I was able to keep construction logs, which are blogs showing my progress through out the task. I was able to take screen shots of my work in progress to show the examiner how I was going about creating my magazine and is also a good way of showing my idea's for colour schemes and fonts and photo's, instead of writing out what I am doing.

For my contents page and double page spread I used a piece of software called QuarkXPress.

This is a piece of software specifically used in the media and is ideal for creating contents pages and double page spreads in magazines. This is because it has guidelines which you pull out from the side so you can draw up rough plans and idea's of how you page is going to be laid out.

This is a screen shot of the basics which can be achieved on a QuarkXPress project.

As well as the actual computer software I have also been using technology for my photography. I used a Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) camera for taking my photo's.



Again similar to the computer software you can achieve the basics, such as taking a standard photo, or you can explore more into what the camera options can offer you, to make you photographs look more professional. You can pan and zoom using the camera lens, as well as change the colour of the photograph to enhance red tones etc.. or to make the photo of a grey scale or sepia. You can also change the different auto settings on the camera as well as change the focus of the camera for close up shots where detail needs to be captured or for other shots such as profile shots.

All of my work has been recorded in the form of blogs. The advantage of using blogs is that I can include screen shots of my work and write about these pictures easily. Without the use of this technology I would have to print out pictures and hand write my work.

Also as this is a media course it is all about using and exploring different technologies so doing work in blog forms is an advantage. You can also use different forms of technologies such as power point to create power point presentations as a form of work, which you can then embed onto your blog using a website called slideshare.net. You can also include video's you have recorded for audience research etc... and then upload them to YouTube and then embed the code of your video into your blog. So by using and having these technologies available to us we can there for widen the ways we produce our work and also its a continual learning progress.