Elizabeth Adetula: 6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product? (AS Re-sit)

Producing my magazine was the first time I actually used Photoshop expansively. Before I had just used Photoshop to copy and paste things but for my magazine I learnt many more useful things about the software. My teachers and fellow class mates helped me navigate particular features of the software and I also taught my self by just practicing and working independently. Photoshop was the best software for constructing and designing my music magazine and learning how to use basic tools was very helpful to me.

As pre-production to making my magazine, there were a number of various equipments and technical devices I used. In the studio were I took all my pictures these are names of some of the apparatus’ I used: a Bawens Gemini Espirit GM500 Flash, Bawens radio trigger, 60cm Soft box, Circular reflector (for some photos) and of course the camera a Canon Eos 400d.

60cm Soft box

Bawens Gemini Espirit GM500 Flash

Canon Eos 400d

After gathering my models, we went to the studio and took pictures. I had a few props microphones and sunglasses. These were really suitable as they are things that can be associated with music and music artists. Also, I brought the props to diversify the look of my pictures as I knew I was going to take all my pictures in the studio. I chose to do this as I liked the look of the dark blue background in the studio. All my pictures were taken with a Canon Eos 400d even the ones that were not included in my magazine. Using this camera was not too difficult for me, learning how to take pictures that were in focus was what I struggled with at first but soon after I mastered it. To achieve the best possible photos I had to make sure I kept a steady hand when taking my photos because if you move the camera quickly, the pictures end up looking indistinct. I made sure I took a range of different shots including medium and long shots, portrait and landscapes, two shots and single shots of my models and medium close up shots.

Landscape

Portrait

When I had taken a good thirty photos, I was given a card reader to insert the memory card into. After I had done this and I had saved my pictures onto My Desktop I began to look through my pictures to find potential ones worth including in my magazine. As the majority of my pictures came out really well and I had various poses of my models, at first it took me a long time to decide on which pictures to use. I asked a few people on what pictures they liked best and this helped a little bit. Once I had whittled my photos down to ten potentials I used ‘Microsoft Office Picture Manager’ to make any necessary alterations e.g. crop and auto brightness.

Before 'Auto- Brightness'

After 'Auto- Brightness'

Subsequently after, I started work on my music magazine front cover. I placed a long shot image of my models as my front cover image. Using toolbars like the ‘Type Tool’ was simple and I used it to type my masthead, cover lines etc. I also used this tool on my contents page and double page spread. On all three of my pages (front cover, contents page and double page spread) I had to use the ‘Move Tool’ to obviously move images, textboxes etc around.

For my front cover I needed to insert a barcode as this is something that is standard so I used the famous search engine ‘Google’ and got images of barcodes I selected the one I wanted, saved it as a picture on my computer and then opened it in Photoshop, moving it to where I wanted with the ‘Move Tool’.

As the backgrounds of all my photos were dark blue/black I did not have to colour the background of my front cover. I simply used my photo to cover the whole page and darkened the backgrounds and backgrounds of my photos as necessary. My contents page and double page spread however had to be filled with a background colour and I picked black. Whilst creating my three pieces I made sure that I used constant fonts like the Arial or similar so my wordings were legible. I also downloaded fonts from 'dafont.com' and this was used to create my masthead To make my masthead on all three pages. I made my cover lines, headline, by line and selling line look more noticeable I added effects to them. To get the same orange colour on all three of my pieces I used the ‘Eyedropper Tool’ which matched the orange colour and make things look professional and even.

To make sure the sizes of my texts on all three of my pieces were of suitable size, I printed off hardcopies of my pieces.