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

The programs which have helped me in this process of the production of my magazine is Adobe Photoshop CS5, Flickr and Blogger. I used Adobe Photoshop CS5 to edit the photos which I took and to compose the layout and features throughout my articles. I really enjoyed using Photoshop and learnt a lot about it while using it these past few weeks. It gave me great control when trying to edit the photo's and gives you much more freedom then I originally thought. I think that is definitely one of the advantages of using Adobe, the Photoshop program allowed me to do the things I wanted to do so that I could produce the product to the best of my ability. One of the disadvantages which I found was it was hard to get use to, and because of the amount of control you have on Adobe Photoshop CS5, the option that you have to choose from a huge, therefore trying to find the right option for the method you want to do, I found quite difficult and even found myself researching many directions which I needed. Although struggling to use the program at first, once you get use to it, you have a lot of freedom and I found movements flowed and I gained the confidence to use Photoshop effectively. Flickr is the program that we used to upload our images onto so we could make annotations. I thought this was a really clever way to annate over the internet, I found it really easy to use and it was not complicated at all. Flickr allows you to do many things with images that you can upload to your personal account, one is to also link them to your blogger. I found this really useful as it saved so much time and effort by having this simple option of sharing. Blogger is another website which we used. Blogger is a website which allows you to have a blog, this means you can post text and images of what you like. In this case, we have been posting the work we have been doing in out media lessons. One of the benefits of doing this on this website is Blogger allows you to save the work you have done and you also can link posts to other posts, as well as even editing the text's font, colour and size. Although what I found with Flickr and Blogger is because it is based on personal account which are on the internet, one of the disadvantage I came across was the privacy which we had sometimes disabled me to fully complete the actions which I tried to achieve, and also the internet connections aren't always reliable so a lot of chance was taken on that. Another factor which effected me during this process was forgetting my password and username. After a week or so, I managed to sort this out, but this effected the level which I was able to work at as the blog on Blogger was the only way I could be getting work done.

As well as using programs, we have learnt a lot as well about how to take the photos and settings we could consider. For example, I choose a mid-shot image. I chose a mid-shot/two-shot image because I wanted the models bodies to be included as their clothing related a lot to my audience and I found it to be very important that I included this. I had to include several other things whilst having the photoshot done like the background, composition, body language and distance. In the end I chose a white background because I felt it was most appropriate for my genre of magazine, and the composition I felt I messed up on a little, as when it came to adding the image onto the cover, the models were too far away from each other and I then had to use photoshop to correct my mistake and bring them closer together. I feel like I still would have a lot to learn when it comes to taking photographs, but am thankful for what I have learnt in technology and how much it helps the magazine industry to create the covers we see daily.