Qu 6: Technologies

Photography:
From my original college magazine, I developed my photography a lot more. What I found really useful was using existing images as a template for my own photographs. This helped when it cam to lighting, composition, assembling the models and props. I also planned my main photographs a lot differently and better, as I used more people, and made the pictures relevant to the text.

Photoshop:
I learned a lot about how to edit my photographs using Photoshop. The software makes just about anything possible and what helped me was having a really good draft to start with and then finding out how to use the software to achieve the designs and effects I was after. think I learnt something new about the software every day. The most exciting effect I learnt to do was to create a Shadow on an image which I did on the double page spread. I knew I wanted an image where the band were in the distance and where they had a really long shadow at the front of the shot but on the winter's day when I took my image there was hardly any sun at all and I couldn't get a shadow. In Photoshop, I made a separate layer and put the models on this so that I could manipulate them without interfering with the original image. Next, I flipped this layer vertically so that they were upside down. I then transformed this layer using the perspective tool so that it took the shape of an afternoon shadow and finally, I made the image solid black, reduced the opacity and blurred it so that it looked like a shadow. This made me wonder about how much images we see in the media might be manipulated.

Flickr:
I used this in order to annotate my final products, and I could therefore easily show which parts of the magazine I was annotating with the note function, therefore making it easier to see. It's a really useful tool for annotation as it limits how much text you can use so you have to be precise and it also means that you can specifically label parts of an image.

Blogger: Blogger is useful as a way of producing a coursework portfolio as it means that everything is kept well organised and you don't risk losing anything. It does have its downsides though. It is difficult to place text and images exactly where you want them and it can be slow and frustrating to use.