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

Photoshop and In designTo create my actual product I used the two adobe products Photoshop and In design. I already had experience with photoshop so using it was fairly self explanatory to me. All the techniques I used were recorded via screenshots in my construction diary and can be viewed in that post. Most of the techniques I used were not new to me but the stamp/clone tool was. I had attempted to select an area from another part of the wall and copy it over the top of the area I wanted to hide but this was not working. After being shown how to use the clone tool, things were much easier and I was able to hide the mark on the wall easily. In design, however, was a completely new experience. From my basic knowledge of photoshop I was able to perform some basic tasks such as adding text and layering things to look aesthetically pleasing but this program is much more text based than photoshop so many things like learning how to create a drop capital were new to me. A drop capital is an essential convention of the magazine article format so learning this skill is useful knowledge that I will use again in future media work.

CameraThe camera I used was an Olympus brand one that the college supplied. It was difficult to work with at first as it was not the kind of camera I am normally used to using, there were much more settings and such I had to become accustomed to. For example there were different settings to use in the different types of lighting. Most of my images were taken inside with artificial lighting which helped quite a lot but one image was taken outside so I had to play around with the exposure in order to get it to work. I also had an issue where the camera was not focusing enough, I combatted this by turning the camera lens until it focused. I also found that if I half pressed the photo button before fully pressing it down, the camera auto-focused itself. The college has a photography studio on sight and another piece of technology I used in this process are the lights. These lights were extremely useful as their brightness could be turned up and down and there fore there was little need to change the exposure of the images afterwards.

PresentingI have made an attempt in my project to use different means of presenting my work. All together I have saved all my work together on Blogger, Google's own brand blogging website. While I have experience with different forms of running a blog, this diary style posting format was different. It was important for me to upload my work in the right order as it goes in chronological order of when you created the work. I have gained skills from this such as time management and over all running of a blog for professional use, not just the formal use I am experienced with.For answering questions and assignments I have gone for 3 different means. I have used power points using Microsoft’s own brand PowerPoint software. This is a pretty standard form of presenting so I didn’t learn much from this experience. I did however learn of a website called Scribd, which I used to put my pp presentations onto my blog. I uploaded them to scribed which converted my pp’s into it’s own format that I could then use by embedding it into my blog. Another form of presenting I used was an online presenting software called Prezi. It is similar to PowerPoint but has a wider range of transitions, templates and effects that PP does not have. It took some getting used to because of the “path” motion it uses to go between each motion but with the prior knowledge of using PowerPoint it was easy to figure out. It game my presentations a more professional feel than the one’s I made in PP so I will definitely be using it again. Similar to the Scribd process, to add my Prezi presentations to my blog I embedded them. For things like adding the sound files/videos I had created to answer some of my questions, I simply added them to an window’s movie maker project, exported them as mp4’s, uploaded them to YouTube and then embedded them to my blog from there.