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

Macbook and PhotoshopFor most of my media product practical work I used my sisters Macbook as I found the schools version of Photoshop on their computers very limited and it didn’t allow me to use the features that I needed. The main software I used to construct my product was Adobe Photoshop CS5. When I first started using Photoshop I could only do the basic things of inserting images, text, and editing a small bit, but now my knowledge of techniques on Photoshop have improved a lot throughout this time. For example I used a lot of tools such as the magic wand tool to select the background to remove it easily when it is not needed instead of selecting the main image. I also learnt using a YouTube tutorial how to cut out hair on Photoshop professionally, as I always found it very hard to do this using the magnetic lasso tool as it never looked good and always looked tacky. So instead I found this new way which defined all the edges and removed the background in a quick and easy way. Another thing I found good was the colour picker to be able to use the same colour throughout the magazine, and also the amount of editing you can do on a photo like changing the colours, brightness, smoothing it out and more.

CameraThe camera I used was a Nikon D70, this camera is quite high tech compared to other cameras so I thought I would use this to get the best results. I found that to get the best images I needed to use a plain background for the editing stages, so I used a plain white wall in my house which I took all the photos in front of. The camera has a great flash which gave my images good lighting which worked well on top of some of the natural lighting I already had. I also used a small tripod to keep the camera sturdy when I was taking the photos to avoid blur and to keep the images in the correct angle. With this camera and tripod I was able to get brilliant quality photographs which worked excellent in my final magazine compared to what they were like in my preliminary activity.

Websites Used

The technology websites I used was obviously Blogger as this is what I have used as my online diary of my media work, by uploading my work stage my stage to hopefully be able to see a progress throughout. I also used Prezi quite a lot throughout my coursework, this is a cloud based presentation site where you can include all your ideas in different ways and it can zoom and use animation to view your work in a different way. At first I found this very difficult to use and I didn’t enjoy using it, but then when I started to get used to it and find out what features it held I used it more and more and got the hang of it. Slideshare is an online publishing site which you can then code your work onto Blogger and other websites. I used this quite a lot to upload work throughout from Microsoft word and power points as I found it very easy to use and it always presented my work well on my blog.