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

      Before Starting this project i had never used much software on the computer nor high quality camera equipment. I have however had a blog before.

I have learnt how to use so many different things during this project. Things such as: Photoshop, Flickr  Prezi, camera lighting and a high quality camera. 

      I had never used Photoshop before so everything was new to me. I quickly grasped the basics and from then everything else became rather straight forward. Photoshop has been the major software i have used for this project and without it the whole process of creating my magazine would have been very long winded. When using Photoshop you can edit photos and text to create fantastic pieces. There are endless amounts of things you can do on Photoshop but the ones i found most useful were being able to crop, erase, adjust; use a magic wand to select things, colour picker, text and adding shapes. 

-Being able to crop meant i could use the part of the image i wanted.

-The eraser meant i could show different layers on top of others and create images such as my main image on my double page spread (as shown below).

I could also use the soft eraser to get a neater more subtle edge to the pictures so they looked as though they all belonged on one layer.

-The adjusting tools were a main part of my front cover. I had to adjust the brightness, contrast, and saturation of the background of the main image a lot. I had to do this to get the bright neon effect i wanted. 

To create the effect on the background i had to use these tools:

 

-The magic wand was a tool that made using Photoshop a lot quicker. Using the magic wand you click on something you want to select on an image for example a person. Once you have clicked on it it will go around the person and you can choose to erase, cut, move the image etc. I used this a lot when i wanted to erase specific areas on a image. 

- The colour picker allowed me to have the exact same colour of a certain area on another area of my image. This was very helpful because it allowed me to make the piece link and look professional because the colours were all the same instead of similar. I used this a lot when linking text with an image, or to get the same colour of text on to another piece of text. 

-The text box allowed me to add text on top of my images.

-The shape tool allowed me to add shapes on to my images and behind my text to highlight specific areas. 

     Flickr and Prezi are online software that allows you to upload and analysis photos easily. I used Flickr a lot when having to analyse college magazines and Prezi more when i had to analyse music magazines. Flickr and Prezi are very different software. On Flickr you add notes that appear when you hover over a specific part on the image. This is quick and easy to do because all you have to do is create an invisible box around the specific area of the photo and then type what you have to say. Also Flickr is connected with blogger so transferring it to my blog was simple. The bad thing about Flickr is that if your image needs to be edited after analyzing it, you can not change the picture and therefore have to start all over again. 

      Prezi on the other hand is more like a slide show. You create your Prezi by adding frames over your image and pieces of texts you write. You then put these frames in order and when you run the Prezi they appear in that order. On Prezi you can zoom in and out on certain areas and move around it as freely as you want, which is a highlight. Although it does take longer to produce compared to Flickr, you can change the image if you need to, which helps in case you need to adjust the image. 

       Working digitally in comparison to more traditional ways such as on paper etc has its advantages and disadvantages. Working digitally widens your options to a more diverse style of showing your work. Like i have used, there are so many sites available such as Prezi and Flickr. Another positive about digital work is the ease. It is a lot easier and quicker to type up work then to hand write it, especially when writing an analysis. There is also a lot of software available that enables you to create products a hundred times better and developed than what is available to create by hand. Again you are able to do this very fast in comparison to traditional methods. Not only can you create elaborate pieces you can also share them online easily, and store them safely and a lot more organised then you can by hand. Although there is a lot of advantages, there are also disadvantages to working digitally. One major problem is that your products are not always one hundred percent safe. This is because at any time your machine may stop working. If you have not saved the file or piece you could have lost it forever. Another concern is in case you loose your internet connection, if working online you can not then continue your work, this could also cause you to loose what you have done.

     Learning to use the Camera and all the equipment that came with it was fairly straight forward. I learnt that you have four different kinds of lights when taking photos. One light is set up high and gives a light on the hair so that it appears the right colour. This is called the hair light. This however can cause the model to have a shadow under their face. To prevent this you then get the model to hold a mirror or any sort of light reflector under their face. Obviously only if the reflector will not be in the shot. If the reflector is in the shot you would then instead use a fill light. A fill light is one of the lights i learnt about and this light fills in the shadows and therefore prevents them. The third light is the back light and is used to separate the subject from the background. The final light is the key light and is the main light used on your subject, the hair, fill and back light all support this light.