Evaluation - Emily

Q: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of creating your product?

Over the course I have both progressed and learned new skills in various areas of technology during the planning, construction and evaluation stages of our music magazine production. When our group banded together; my main experience was with graphic design, photography, and Photoshop. Over the duration of the course our group has worked together with the photoshop work, which has in turn widened my knowledge and taught me new things about the software.

Photoshop

For our magazine we worked on Photoshop Elements 6.0; and together as a group we bought the software and downloaded it at home to practice the basics before starting our main task. When we finally began our main task, my progression with the software mainly fell down to playing around with opacity; this can be seen on our contents page [will add link when pictures uploaded] which was something I had never really used before when using both DTP and photo manipulation software. With photoshop I also used a graphics tablet, which I used to draw the wire that is the main feature of our front cover.

Pages

When we began constructing our magazine, we decided to revert away from Microsoft Publisher and use the Apple equivalent; iPages. The software was a whole new experience of Desktop Publishing and was most certainly different from most software I've had to use before. As a group we sat down on a mac and experimented with the basic tools that the software offered. However it did provide a very professional look and feel to it, and was a lot more effective than using Microsoft Publisher to construct it.

Blogger

My knowledge of Blogger has also been expanded over the course of the construction of the main task; our group decided that our prelim task was lacking a lot of progress shots of our work, so this time round we tried to incorporate print screens according to relevant changes in our work. Personally I have learned many new things about blogger including video embedding, embedding links and different formatting styles.

Evaluation

When creating my evaluation I have also researched into new ways of presenting my work; one being Windows Movie Maker, and the other being SlideShare. Windows Movie Maker is a simple video construction software that I mainly use as a visual to assist any audio/spoken work that I do; this can be seen on my evaluation question on distribution. For our photoshoot video however, we used the Apple equivalent, iMovie; which was by far a lot more easier to use with much better results on the editing.

Slideshare is an online slideshow uploader which allows you to embed presentations onto blogs; I used this for my audience evaluation question; however because I am mainly used to making interactive slideshows rather than linear slideshows, the software was very difficult to use in the sense that my presentation may seem rather irregular. I do intend to improve my skills of the software over time.

Photography was most probably my strongest skill in the group, as I study it as well as it being my main hobby outside of school. I currently use a Nikon D40 with an 18-55mm Lens and a Colour Polarizing Lens (CPL) and Ultra-Violet (UV) double thread-lens. For the photoshoot for our main task front cover I used 2 remote lights (which emit a bright light when the camera trigger goes off) which provided an even and adjustable source of lighting for the photoshoot. I had only ever used remote lights once before which was on inanimate objects; so because of the photos taken for the magazine I managed to learn how to use those lights for people and portraiture; a skill that I can also carry on in my future photography projects.