Evaluation Question 6

Question 6: What have you learnt about new technologies from the process of constructing

this product?

Antony Pettersen

Photography and Photo Editing

During the process of producing a student magazine and a music magazine I have learnt how to use a digital camera, organise a photo shoot and use digital photo editing software e.g. Photoshop.

Digital Cameras The use of a digital camera gave me great speed and accuracy in take the photos due to the camera workings. The use of auto focus and a zoom process opposed to a lens helped me take good quality photos at speed.

As well as the process of taking accurate photos the digital camera allowed me to take an unlimited amount of photos, which I could upload at ease, of which I could select the more suitable to use in my media products

These technological advances gave me a massive advantage over using a manual film camera as it allowed me to take good photos with minimal ability and no expert scope as well as allowing me to easily upload the photos onto a computer and import them into a design programme.

Photoshop Photoshop gave me the ability to manipulate images and improve there overall quality as well as rectify any slight blemished present of them.

The software also allowed me to achieve a professional manipulated photo for use in my magazine. E.G. the ability to crop a background out of a photo so only the main focus was present. This was useful to create my main cover photo as I would have had to use the cover image as my whole front page if I kept the background in.

Using Photoshop also opened my eyes to how prevalent and simple it is to manipulate photos in the use of the media helping me understand more than media is a staged view of reality and only features what we are meant to be led to believe is fact. E.G manipulated images creating a warped view of beauty.

Photoshop Techniques

Two techniques I learned from Photoshop to use in photo editing was the patch tool as well the quick selection tool.

I used the patch tool to take some of the gleam off the photo of a record I used for my magazines logo and I also used the quick selection tool to remove the background from my images.

Examples of Photo Shop Techniques

As you can see I have reduced the glare on the record using the patch tool as well as cropping out the centre and filling it in with a colour which I then manipulated to give a slightly pixelated effect. In this image you can also see the use of a quick selection tool to remove the sleeve from underneath the image.

In Design

The software I used to create my magazine was In Design. This allowed me to professionally design my product due to its operating system and the way which it provided a good background to design the magazine from.

The features that helped the most were use the use of columns and also the page set up which allowed you to change the bleed setting.

Also In Design allowed the use of image importation which was very useful.

Examples of in design

Page Setup: Columns:

My work with columns:

Internet and Blogger.

The internet and blogger allowed me to produce and share my portfolio in a way which was eco friendly due to the saving on paper and it doesn’t have a carbon footprint due to it being able to be sent in email.

Also the internet was helpful with the research and planning of assignments as it has a wealth of material available in a quick time frame. E.G photos of magazine covers, contents pages and double page spreads to analyse.

Online Resources

I have also used online resources like Prezi and slide share to present the evidence for my portfolio. This was beneficial as it gave me a number of platforms to produce evidence in a visual way and it was very useful for products like mood boards as well as embedding power points and photos.

Conclusion

In the modern era producing a music magazine is an easy task once the necessary skills and understanding of the software are learned. If the task was carried out around 15 years ago it would be a lot more complex but due to technology many of the processes are carried out for you E.G focusing the camera. This means digital media requires less skills and finesse than traditional media. Also due to technological advances media production software is now available to almost everyone.