Through creating a magazine, the presenter learned about various hardware, software, and photography tools. The main hardware used was an Apple iMac computer from 2005. Interface tools included a mouse and keyboard. Photos were taken using a Nikon Coolpix bridge camera and D3100 DSLR in a school photography studio, along with flashes, soft boxes, and backdrops. The primary software used were Adobe Photoshop to design pages, Adobe InDesign to lay out text, and Wordpress to present the magazine creation process online. Key functions demonstrated included using magnetic lasso and layers in Photoshop, adjusting text frames in InDesign, and adding pages in Wordpress.

1. “What have you learnt
about technologies from
the process of constructing
this product?”
In this presentation I will be demonstrating how I
used certain hardware and software tools to
create my magazine.

2. Hardware tools
The first, and possibly most important hardware tool that I used was the Apple
iMac computer I used. The computer I used was an iMac G5 produced in 2005.
This computer has a 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, with 3 GB of RAM memory.
It was on this computer that I did all the design and editing work for my
magazine.
Apple iMac computer

3. While using the Apple iMac I used a mouse and
keyboard as two interface tools. The keyboard I
have been using was designed by Apple, released
in 2003 and used until 2007, and it uses a USB port to
connect to the iMac computer.
The mouse I have been using was also designed by
Apple and used from 2005 to 2009, and it also uses a
USB port to connect to the iMac computer.
Without these interface tools it would not have been
possible to use the Apple iMac computer.
Apple iMac mouse and keyboard

4. Through the process of creating my magazine I had to take pictures for the
cover, contents page and article page. Below I will demonstrate the different
tools I used to take these photos.
Camera tools and photography studio
One of the tools I used to take the
photos was my own 14mp, nikon
coolpix l120. This was a bridge camera
that produced good quality point-
and-shoot photos without needing
any special extra hardware.
Sometimes, instead of using my own
camera in various locations, I used a
digital slr camera in the school’s own
small studio. The camera I used was a
Nikon D3100, and the settings I used
were a manual aperture (f11) and a
shutter speed of 1/300th.

5. With the school’s own studio and
digital slr camera I used a
horseshoe flash trigger. This
connected with the top of the
camera and sent an infra red signal
to the strobe flashes, thus triggering
the flash in-sync with the camera
shutter. The speed of the trigger
was set to 1/300th of a second to
match the strobe speeds
Camera tools and photography studio
Also in the school’s own studio I used
four Hemisphere 300 strobe flashes.
These flashes had a dial on the back
to adjust output, and the two auxiliary
lights used to illuminate the model
were set to a slave that triggered in-
sync with a built in light sensor.

6. With the two strobe flashes that
illuminated the model, I used two
soft boxes. These soft boxes
connected to the flashes and
dispersed the light giving a softer,
rounder light on the subject without
obvious shadowing.
Camera tools and photography studio
The models themselves were stood in-
front of a blank, white backdrop. The
backdrop was lit with two of the
strobes on full power without flash in
order to create a high exposure, white
background.

7. Software tools
The primary piece of software on these iMacs that I used to design my magazine
was Adobe Photoshop. This was a very intelligent piece of software that made it
much easier to design a professional magazine. On the next slide I will
demonstrate how I used the magnetic lasso tool to cut the band out of the
Image below.
Adobe Photoshop

8. I cut the band out of the picture below by clicking the “Magnetic lasso” tool on
the left of the page, clicking around the edge of the band, and letting the
magnet stick to the band:
Adobe Photoshop

9. Putting a lasso around the image placed a dotted line around the bit I had cut. I
cut this bit out by clicking “Layer,” “New,” and “Layer via Cut”:
Adobe Photoshop

10. This cut the bit I wanted out. So I then deleted the left-over background, and was
left with the image I wanted:
Adobe Photoshop

11. Another piece of software that I used on these iMacs to construct my magazine
was Adobe InDesign. Once I had completed the layout and basic design of my
article page, I inserted it into InDesign and added the text to it. In the next slide I
will demonstrate how I inserted the text:
Adobe InDesign

12. I inserted the text into InDesign by clicking the “Text Tool” button and dragging
the text box into the appropriate location:
Adobe InDesign

13. I then adjusted the text box so it would have two
columns by clicking “Object”, “Text Frame
Options”, and then in the dialogue box that
opened I changed it so it would have 2 columns:
Adobe InDesign

14. This changed the text box
to include two columns
instead of one, so when I
inserted text into the box it
continued across both
paragraphs:
Adobe InDesign

15. Another piece of software that I used in the creation of my magazine was the
online website tool; Wordpress. I used Wordpress to present the methods I used
to create my magazine, and the research and homework I conducted for it.
Below I will demonstrate how I created a new page for an evaluation question,
and added it as a child of the page, “Evaluation Questions.”
Wordpress

16. I started by first hovering the mouse over “My sites”, and then in the drop down
list I clicked “Add” next to “Pages”:
Wordpress

17. Then, in the “Add New Page” page that appeared, I added an appropriate
title, added the text I needed at this stage to the main page body, and then
under “Parent” I clicked “Evaluation Questions” in the drop down list. Finally, I
clicked the “Publish” button to publish this page to my website:
Wordpress

18. As we can see, this published the page “Question 6” to my website:
Wordpress