Q7. Looking back at the preliminary task what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to a full product?

My preliminary task was to create a college magazine front cover and contents page.

For that task i had to take a variety of photographs that would go on to my front cover and contents page using a Canon EOS 400D. Then later my photographs would be loaded up on to the computer then edited on Photoshop CS3. When taking my pictures i had to think about what my cover and contents page was going to look like during that process. but I was new to operating the camera and soft-box , Also getting the camera to focus well on the subject was fairly tricky an kept giving out blurry pictures, however that did not turn out to be too much of a problem after a bit of practice and I took some decent photographs for my college magazine. Look back on this task I could of been better on choosing my locations as pictures were there’s a lot of sun is the best place to them.

Since that task, i noticed that deadlines set were very important as it only slows you down and makes you work harder due to work set by other subjects, so now i have really been hard on myself to meet deadlines. I completed my research on time, and when I had to start working on creating my final products, I found my models very quickly and booked a studio, soft-box and a Canon EOS 400D to take my picture with a long time within the deadline, this time I was certain of what I wanted from my models, many pictures of my models were in different poses, so that I could later choose the best ones.

When starting the main task organising the equipment became a routine so it wasn’t a problem anymore, i paid great attention to the safety hazards and the great amount of attention needed towards them to avoid injury from electric shock. Also I learnt more about the effect that soft-boxes create with the artificial light source. It then quickly spreads and hits the subjects softly getting rid of the darkness, this is what makes the picture look natural and smooth. Using Adobe Photoshop became easy for me after guidance and practice, so I focused on trying to get the best out of my skills when designing.

When creating my magazine, I used a variety of important fonts just as they are in real magazines. The majority of fonts that I used are sans-serif which is text without the flicks on the ends of the font. The effect that this gives my magazine is a modern feeling which is what my audience preferred as my target was teenagers and young adults.

The strengths of my work, is that people in my class have told me they  like it, the ways i put my colours together consistently and also the information it gives out, including my teacher who was pleased with what I created so that motivated me. Completing my work on time was good for my esteem; i seemed to be able to complete my magazine pages without rushing. This was because i was keen to learn more and become better so i done things such as research more magazines and doing more textual analysis.

The weaknesses of my work would be that some of the images used in my magazine products are slightly out of focus due to because this was when i first started using the cameras. Also my college magazine its self wasn’t very good i could of chosen a much better picture an included more things on the page.

 If I was to do this again you would be able to see the change in quality, I would definitely be sure to have the camera focus better on the model to have more defined images an add more to my pages.

Looking back at my preliminary college magazine task, I believe that I have improved. This is proved due to because Shorty after i created another magazine before creating my music magazine just to experiment.

Audience Feedback:

Elijah: ' next time use brighter colours as it will catch the audiences attention much quicker, buh its sick!'

Vanessa: very impressive'

Kevin: 'more colours would have been better so it can stand out more, buh i like wah you have produced' ;)

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

In this assignment I used a variety of products to put together my music magazine. The internet was one of the main technologies that I used; to start off we all had to go on the internet to create a blogger account a blogging storage service that posts user’s private blogs with time-stamped entries with the ability to upload images. Blogger was something I wasn’t familiar with but I’ve seen blogs but just didn’t know how to programme it. After creating a blogger and using it for a couple days it became very straight forward to use, I had small issues with it were it was hard to put pictures that I would upload into the right places as it doesn’t let you drop and drag, it gives specific options: ‘left, right centre’ or for the sizes ‘small, medium, large, x large’. I ended up having pictures that I have uploaded looking messy on the blogs so it took me a while to sort them out, even to this very point some pictures aren’t where I want them to be.  

I also noticed that Blogger claims to allow shortcut support, but it doesn’t work for me, for example ‘Ctrl+V’ to paste text from Microsoft Word, therefore the only way is to drag and drop the text which wasn’t easy for me to blend in with as when you drag and drop wherever you drag it from it disappears from that page.The internet was also a big part of included for my researching. Using www.google.com and www.Wikipedia.com  as my search engines of choice, I found many images of magazine front covers for my textual analysis in Google’s image browsing search engine, as well as using the web search to find relevant magazine publishing companies to write a case study on, Wikipedia became useful for finding out about these companies in detail for example when they were first established.

Software’s such as Microsoft Word 2007, which is a standard word processor, was mainly used to type up and stores my work as well as creates my audience research questionnaire. I made use of its spell-check ability to make sure that my work was grammatically correct before dragging and dropping it into my blogger. I used Microsoft Excel 2007 which wasn’t anything new to me so this was fairly easy to use, here i was able to create highly customisable graphs such as those that I used to represent my audience research results.

Another main application I used was Adobe Photoshop CS3; Adobe Creative Suite (CS) this is a collection of graphic design, video editing, and web development applications made by Adobe Systems. The collection consists of Adobe's applications (e.g., Photoshop, Acrobat, In Design), that are based on various technologies .this an advanced graphics editing software to convert my print screens of my audience research graphs into a .GIF image file that could be uploaded onto Blogger in a good resolution and small file size.

I mainly used this when actually creating my magazine i used it to edit my images and designing them. Adobe Photoshop isn’t easy to use but i has an idea of how to use it so i kept practising and gained more experience when my older brother showed me my way around it so i became fairly strong at designing. As my theme of my magazine was a black/white look i used ‘desaturate’ which would make the colour of the image change straight to black and white them i would just use ‘curves’ to level it out to the write tone. I also used the Spot Healing and Patch Tools to remove spots on my model’s faces,

Although I did not develop any more knowledge about the application, I gained new skills by trying new ideas of manipulating images such as texturing the statue design on my double page spread.

I used a Canon EOS 400D 10.1 megapixel camera to take my pictures. This was my first time using the camera therefore I was learning new things about this piece of technology all the way through. The first thing that I learnt about using the camera correctly is the correct orientation when taking a picture. They are usually taken in a portrait orientation to fit in as much of the subject as possible, leaving out unnecessary background. When taking my pictures, this made me consider how the image was going to turn out rather than just taking a picture. I also kept in mind how I would frame my subject and the type of shot that I was going to use. I also learnt about what different angles conveyed, and I took most of my pictures at a low angle to give my subjects a sense of authority. However I found difficulty in getting my camera to focus well on the subjects in a few of my pictures, getting the flash to actually flash was a problem at the start but i got know how to use that properly.

Positioning my models in the right place was always in mind between the background, soft-box and camera because my teacher before we took the photographs told us the positioning was vital. The models have to stand between the camera and background to allow the camera to focus on the subject, and the soft-box has to face the subject from the side to create the feeling of 3-dimensions in the model. The soft-box can be placed at any angle (low or high) to simulate the required light source.

Q5. How did you attract/adress your audience

My main photograph is of two young teenagers staring at each other, this gives a sort of 'battle rap' look so this would make my audience want to read more about the front image is about. The costumes they’re wearing targets my audience to, black bomber Nike jacket which are very familiar to my target audience this would make them think they can relate to the magazine.
When attracting my audience it was important to address certain features of the magazine well so that i could grab hold of a particular group of people. I noticed its little things that depend on who your audience are for example more writing than pictures attracts a different group of people.

I attracted my audience first of all by using dark colours and my black and white effect which is consistent throughout the magazine. The title was in red which connotes an alert message and sense of urgency. Secondly the pricing of the magazine which is affordable for my target audience. I recognised consistently was a key method used to attract my audience because if i was to have my contents and other feature different it might make them not want to read on as they should be relaxed and comfortable reading.