What I have learnt about technologies from the

process of constructing my product …

In order to edit the photos I had taken I needed to use the software ‘Photoshop’.

I had only used this once before, in my preliminary coursework, so had little knowledge of it’s potential. So during this project I learnt a lot about how it worked and what exactly I could do with my pictures. For example I didn’t know how to make my pictures look ‘grainy’ or how to get the authentic look I wanted.

Photoshop …

The main thing I learnt how to do was to give my pictures the ‘sepia’ or black and white look, and give them a grainy texture to make them look authentic.

See next slide for how I achieved this …

1) I created a second layer and covered the picture with a ‘mustard’ yellow colour by selecting this box and choosing the colour.

2) I then changed the opacity of the yellow so you could see the picture through it but so it still had a yellowy tinge. I did this by choosing this drop down box.

3) I then went onto the ‘filter’ tab, clicked on

Quark express

I designed the layout of my magazine using the software ‘quark express’ which allowed me to view how my product was going to look. I could load up all my edited images from Photoshop onto Quark express and arrange them how I wanted to.

I hadn’t used this software much before, as with Photoshop, so learnt a lot about it throughout this module.

I learnt about it’s functions mainly by experimenting myself and seeing what I could do with the images I had taken and edited but also how to construct the writing. I learnt how to set it so the writing surrounded the images, this was done with the ‘runaround’ option …

• quark express (runaround)

All this new technology that I have been learning how to use made the whole production process quicker and easier than any other method. If it did not exist we would still be cutting and pasting images onto paper and gluing them down!

This made me realise that it is now much easier for anyone to produce something that looks reasonably professional.

Large companies can now effortlessly produce products like magazines, newspapers etc on a large scale and sell them all over the country.

I find this rise in technology amazing and can’t image how the media industry ever survived without it!

Use of the internet…

The internet helped with my product in a number of aspects.

It was a big part of my research and planning aswell as the production itself. Looking at the web versions of magazines gave me inspiration and ideas for my own and gave me an idea of the conventions used, so I could incorporate these into my product.

I didn’t use the internet much in the actual production of my product as all the images used had to be our own, otherwise I think I would have used a few pictures from the internet of the bands I talk about or even just their logo as I couldn’t take these myself, if they were to look professional.

Blogging … I felt that presenting my research and

planning in a blog was a clear and coherent way to produce it, as ‘Blogger’ sets it out in a way that is easy to read and gives the opportunity for it to look professional and a more technological way of presenting my work. I much prefer this to just writing an essay.

My blog consists of everything I needed to think about for my product before I started doing it:

http://emfmedia.blogspot.com/

However I feel that I should have kept a ‘construction log’ of my progress and noted down what I did each time I worked on my product. This way I would have been able to refer to it if I had forgotten how to do something.

Having a ‘time plan’ in my blog was very useful as I could refer to it as to keep on track with what I was meant to be doing each lesson and what I was aiming for.