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.
No comments:
Post a Comment