Evaluation question 6

Question 6: What Have You Learnt About Technologies From The Process of Constructing This Product ?1. Google - Google is a search engine which was founded in 1998. You are able to search anything you wish and get the results in less than a second. I used Google to research practically everything; images, front covers, contents pages, double page spreads and different genre of music magazines (e.g. Rock – Kerrang, Indie – NME). If I needed to search anything I used Google because it is the best and most user friendly search engine around and other ones, like Bing, are confusing to use.

2. Blogger - This allowed me to document all my research, planning, evidence of making, challenges I faced during the production and any amendments I had to make. Blogger is useful as you are able to access it anywhere as long as you have internet. It is a secure network that is password protected and you will never lose your work because it will be saved on a server.

3. Pentax K-m – This is the camera I used to take all the pictures for all three pages of my music magazine. The use of a digital SLR made the process of taking pictures very simple, it would have been much more difficult if I had to used a film camera and get the pictures developed –this would have take a lot longer to do and the effect would have been different.

4. Tripod - Although using the DSLR as a handheld camera without a tripod would have also worked but it would have increased the likelihood of there being camera shake in the pictures. Camera shake happens when the camera isn’t held still and the picture will then become blurry. Camera shake can happen when you are nudged or even when you breathe in and out. The tripod was used to steady the camera and stop there being any camera shake. This was the most effective way of stopping camera shake and I think it helped a lot.

5. HP Pavilion dm3 - This is my laptop I use for all my work. I have Adobe PhotoShop on my laptop, which is fairly new technology and not a vast amount of people have the full edition as it is still very expensive. My laptop is small and has over 300GB of memory, I am able to use it virtually anywhere and I am able to store all my work onto it.

6. PhotoShop CS4 – I used PhotoShop to produce the front cover of the music magazine and the contents page. Using PhotoShop was fairly new to me but after trying it out I was getting used to it and it was quite easy to work with.

7. InDesign CS – I used InDesign to produce the double page spread. This was a completely new piece of software to me and I had no idea how to use it. I asked my teacher to explain the basics and after that I was able to do the basics. It took me a while to get used to this program as, in my eyes, it isn’t very user friendly.