Question 6. What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

 

When making my product there are many ways technology has helped me to construct my magazine. The camera I learnt how to use, to take all my images was an AGFA photo Selecta 14. I used this camera to capture my images for my main task which was the music magazine. While I used a Canon E0S 400D for my preliminary task. The location of all my images was in a house, where the lighting was very bright. This conducted my magazine to look professional, with good quality pictures. For the success of these photos I had to consider how bright the lighting was going to be and how much time I was going to use to shoot these photos. Using the AGFA Photo camera made taking quality pictures much more easier, with its special features that consisted of 15x optical zoom, 2.7”LCD, 27mm wide angle, OIS stabiliser and 14.1 Mega Pixel and also flash.  All of these factors contribute to the excellent quality of the photos this camera produces, which means that the pictures don’t need much editing once the photo is captured. The main problem I had with the AGFA Photo Is that once I decided not to use flash the auto focus was not there so the pictures came of blurry most of the time, so using the flash was compulsory to get the best quality photos, using this camera.

Other than the cameras, another form of technology I used to construct my magazine was Photoshop, with this application I have built my skills on working on my magazine. However before working on Photoshop my skills to do anything was very rigid and limited. But using Photoshop regularly has made me gain more skills and understanding on ways to work on this application. I used Photoshop CS3, in this I changed up the image contrast and the brightness to make the front cover look more dramatic and professional I also did this for the images on my content page and also double page spread. With Photoshop I also edited my fonts, which I created an outer glow and a backdrop shadow. All of this has made an impact on my successful outcome on my music magazine.

I also used the grid layout for my double page spread which helped me find it easier to divide my page into two, so I could place my image on one side and my text on the other. Another useful point about Photoshop is that it allows files to be saved a JPEG which is very useful to me as this was the only way I could send my pictures into blogger.

Another thing I learnt is you could download free fonts from Dafonts.com straight on to Photoshop, which I had no idea of this before enhancing my skills using Photoshop. This gave a huge impact to the way my magazine came out, especially the front cover and the double page spread.