1. The document discusses the development of the author's digital media skills over time through various portfolio projects. 2. For foundational portfolios, the author used a Canon 550D DSLR camera to take higher quality images than a phone camera for a music magazine. Photoshop was also used to edit images by cropping subjects from backgrounds. 3. These same digital skills were applied to an advanced portfolio, including using the Canon 550D to capture footage for a music video by adjusting the lens and exposure settings to focus on moving subjects.

1. 1A) describe how you developed your skills in the use of digital technology for
media production and evaluate how these skills contributed to your creative
decision making. Refer to a range of examples in your answer to show how these
skills developed over time (25 marks)
Using different forms of digital technology is a crucial stage of post-production
enabling me to produce an authentic yet creative piece of work. Digital technology
was used for creating my foundation portfolio of creating both a preliminary task
which was to design a school magazine, along with an ancillary task which was to
create a music magazine. Similar forms of digital technology were also used for my
advanced portfolio which included three different ancillary tasks including a music
video, a digpak and a magazine album advertisement.
For my foundation portfolio, I used a Canon 550D DSLR digital camera to take images
for my music magazine which I included in all of the pages. I chose to use a Canon
550D DSLR because I have learned from creating my preliminary task, that using an
iPhone 4 camera was not very effective as the images were low quality and blurry.
Using a digital camera had enabled me to use more advanced settings such as
adjusting the lens of the camera so that the image was able to focus on the artist
and take shots of him in better quality. I then uploaded these images onto my
computer so that I was able to use them as my main and sub images for the page
spreads of my music magazine. I found out that the quality of the images made the
magazine look more professional and enticing as the high quality images
demonstrated a clear look of the artist. From using the Canon 550D, I decided that
using a more advanced digital camera was more effective than using a iPhone
camera because it has more settings that I could choose from in order to achieve the
standard that I want the outcome of my images to look like. Therefore, when it
comes to taking images for my advanced portfolio, I already had the knowledge to
use a digital camera for better results. Using the Canon 550D was effective because I
had gained the skills of knowing how to change the camera settings in relation to the
exposure, the saturation and the use of the lens to blur on specific aspects of the
shot which will help to achieve professional looking images.
From gaining these skills of using a digital camera from my foundation portfolio, I
decided to use the same camera of a Canon 550D DSLR for my advanced portfolio. I
chose to carry on using this camera for my advanced portfolio because I had seen
the results that I had achieved from my foundation coursework. I wanted to achieve
the same standard and quality of images as the ones that I had taken from my
previous work. Therefore, again I used the Canon 550D to take footage for my music
video instead of taking images. I used the exact same skills that I had gained from my
previous tasks of using the lens of the camera effectively and also setting the camera
to the right exposure. Similarly from my foundation portfolio, I decided to use the
same techniques such as adjusting the lens of the camera to enable me to focus on
the main subject of the frame. The only difference is that I had to continuously
adjust the lens as instead of images, it was footage, and therefore the main subject
was constantly moving. The footage that I took using the digital camera was
significantly used for my music video. I took a variety of shots that I used to allow my

2. video to demonstrate a clearer narrative. I found this very effective as the footage
was used to help me achieve allowing the audience to have a clear understanding of
what is going on in the video.
The use of Adobe Photoshop CS6 was another form of digital technology that I used
as part of my foundation portfolio. I chose to use Photoshop in order to help me edit
the images that I took using the Canon 550D. I wanted to edit the images so that I
could edit out the background so that I could place them onto the pages of my
magazine to gain a more professional look. In order to achieve this, I had to refine
the edges of the main subject in the image which was of my artist. I firstly used the
magic wand tool but then was told to use the Lasso tool instead as it was more
accurate. Using this and the inverse select tool was used to crop out the main
subject from the background. This made the image match the background of the
magazine therefore gave it a more clean-cut look. I found this task effective
therefore I decided to do the same for the rest of my chosen images. Using
Photoshop helped me to gain further skills of learning how to use specific tools to
make the images appear more relevant to the creative piece of work.