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

In this coursework unit, I had the chance to use many products of technology. One of the many pieces I used was the online account of Blogger.com - Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. 

This was my first time ever using blogger or any blogging system, but fortunately I found it easy to use and understand. Although it was very easy to use and understand, I found problems using it. One problem was that I could not change my design of my wallpaper; I struggled on this until I found it soon later. Another problem was with the images. I couldn’t just copy and paste an image but instead had to save it then go to blogger and upload it, this became time consuming and made posting on blogs much longer than it could have been. I have learnt that although blogs are open for people to look and comment on it is also possible to restrict to people who view it. This is an advantage as my coursework now can not be stolen and re-used.   

 The second piece I used was the internet in my researching. Google.com as a way of researching such things as publishing houses, different magazines in comparison to mine and etc. I found images for my analysis of a front cover, double page spread all in Google’s image browsing function. I used software on the computer such as Microsoft Word 2003 and 2007, which is a standard word processor to type up and store my word. I used it when writing my analysis as the blogger does not contain spell checks.

I also used Adobe Photoshop CS3; Adobe Photoshop is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems Incorporated, an advanced graphics editing software in which I made my front cover, content page and double page spread on.  I knew how to use Adobe Photoshop CS3 as I have used it before in my college magazine, but I was confused on certain things such as cropping around images, lay out etc. Fortunately I overcame those confusions and ended up with a good music magazine; looking at my college magazine and music magazine front covers I detected a lot of differences, such the way the images is cropping and the choice of colour scheme.   

The camera I used is called Canon EOS 400D, this was the first time ever using this kind of camera, but I found it easy to use. To get a good shot of my models all I had to do was focus on the eyes of the models. I have learnt the importance of flash and how condition such as day and night can affect the shot. Soft-boxes are used as opposed to standard in built pop-up camera flashes because camera flashes produce a very intense flash. This is firstly a disadvantage because there is no way to adjust the intensity of the flash, whereas soft-boxes have that feature.

Lastly, I learnt the models need to be positioned rightly for the shot to look good. The model has to stand between the camera and the background to allow the camera to focus on the subject. 

 I used software's on the computer such as Microsoft office powerpoint 2007, which is on presentational programme. Using powerpoint enable me to crop pictures which I then copied onto paint and saved as an image on my file (JPEG). This later lead to me uploading the images onto blogger. I used Microsoft word 2007 to create my audience questionnaire, which was beneficial towards understanding what people liked most about magazines. I finally used microsoft excel 2007 so that I could create graphs to represent my audience research results. Apart learning how to crop images on powerpoint, I didn't really learn anything new from these applications.