6. What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

During the process of creating my music magazine I have used a variety of different media technologies, which have assisted me in the production media product. Through using these technologies I have learnt new skills and further enhanced my current skills with each of the media technologies.

Hardware:
I used various different platforms of hardware in the production of my music magazine. The most used item during the process was the computer, seeing as this was used to run the software and assemble my magazine. I used two computers in total which were a Packard Bell ixtreme desktop computer (my home computer) and a dell desktop computer (the school computer), both running Windows 7 operating system. Through using the computer I didn't learn very many new skills, seeing as I use a computer on a regular basis and the tasks weren't too different from normal.

The other main piece of hardware I used was a camera. This was used for taking the photographs that were imported into the various pages of my magazine. For this I used my Apple iPhone 4, and utilised the inbuilt 5 mega-pixel camera for the numerous shots. The camera worked well, however seeing as it was only 5 mega-pixels, when I went to scale it up to fit in my magazine the images started to blur and loose image quality a little bit. During the use of the camera I learnt that the amount of light that enters the lens, will dictate the quality of the image. So seeing as the lens on my camera was small, I would get better quality pictures it brighter environments.

Software:
There was only one main piece of software I used to create my music magazine, with the exception of the Windows Photo Viewer (which I used to view the photographs I took), which was Adobe Photoshop CS5.1. I used this program exclusively to create the designs of the front cover, contents page and double page spread. We had access to Adobe InDesign CS5.5 however, down to personal preference, I chose to stick with Photoshop because I am more familiar with it's features. Despite the fact that I am familiar with how Photoshop works I still learnt a lot of new skills, such as how to create a depth of field through masking as well as how to utilise layers efficiently to create depth to and image.

I also used Microsoft Office Powerpoint 2007, which wasn't used directly in creating the magazine but instead to produce a presentation that explained effective uses of the Liquify filter tool, which I presented to the rest of my media group in an exercise to share knowledge of Photoshop. Even though the presentation was a relatively minor project I still learnt how upload a presentation to internet and embed it on a web page.