1. What have you learnt about
technologies from the process of
constructing your media product?

2. Macbook and Photoshop
For most of my media product practical work I used my
sisters Macbook as I found the schools version of
Photoshop on their computers very limited and it
didn’t allow me to use the features that I needed. The
main software I used to construct my product was
Adobe Photoshop CS5. When I first started using
Photoshop I could only do the basic things of inserting
images, text, and editing a small bit, but now my
knowledge of techniques on Photoshop have improved
a lot throughout this time. For example I used a lot of
tools such as the magic wand tool to select the
background to remove it easily when it is not needed
instead of selecting the main image. I also learnt using
a YouTube tutorial how to cut out hair on Photoshop
professionally, as I always found it very hard to do this
using the magnetic lasso tool as it never looked good
and always looked tacky. So instead I found this new
way which defined all the edges and removed the
background in a quick and easy way. Another thing I
found good was the colour picker to be able to use the
same colour throughout the magazine, and also the
amount of editing you can do on a photo like changing
the colours, brightness, smoothing it out and more.

3. Camera
The camera I used was a Nikon D70, this
camera is quite high tech compared to
other cameras so I thought I would use this
to get the best results. I found that to get
the best images I needed to use a plain
background for the editing stages, so I used
a plain white wall in my house which I took
all the photos in front of. The camera has a
great flash which gave my images good
lighting which worked well on top of some
of the natural lighting I already had. I also
used a small tripod to keep the camera
sturdy when I was taking the photos to
avoid blur and to keep the images in the
correct angle. With this camera and tripod I
was able to get brilliant quality
photographs which worked excellent in my
final magazine compared to what they
were like in my preliminary activity.

4. Websites Used
The technology websites I used was obviously Blogger as this
is what I have used as my online diary of my media work, by
uploading my work stage my stage to hopefully be able to see
a progress throughout.
I also used Prezi quite a lot throughout my coursework, this is
a cloud based presentation site where you can include all your
ideas in different ways and it can zoom and use animation to
view your work in a different way. At first I found this very
difficult to use and I didn’t enjoy using it, but then when I
started to get used to it and find out what features it held I
used it more and more and got the hang of it.
Slideshare is an online publishing site which you can then
code your work onto Blogger and other websites. I used this
quite a lot to upload work throughout from Microsoft word
and power points as I found it very easy to use and it always
presented my work well on my blog.