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

The main pieces of technology used in creating my product were a camera, Adobe photo shop CS6 and Microsoft publisher. The camera I used was a Canon eos 600d, it took professional looking photos that came out in good quality. I used the sport action setting which meant that if I held down the capture button it would take a succession of photos depending on how long I held the button for. This came in very handy because if there was a certain pose I liked yet the model was blinking during one shot I could just pick another one of exactly the same pose in which he was not blinking. It also saved time and meant I would not have to conduct a photo shoot as I had a lot of images to choose from when constructing my pages. When it came to using photo shop I made some decisions that were different and not generally expected of a professional magazine. Rather than drastically alter my images I decided to simply adjust the shadows and brightness instead in order to prove that my magazine is more about content rather than how aesthetically pleasing it is to the reader. This would instantly label my magazine as different and unlike other magazines available on the market. Publisher was quite a simple software to use when it came to the actual construction of my pages. It was very easy to arrange textboxes and images in order to look most attractive to the audience. Internet research of other magazines and the annotations I did of existing magazines helped greatly in deciding the placement of words etc. on my magazine. Also, it was easy for me to pick up on things that could be done differently or things that had to be included given the expected design of magazines e.g. barcode, masthead. However, it was not just in the construction phase that I used a lot of technology. During the research phase I used social media and an online questionnaire (created with the website ‘Question Pro’) in order to study my audience and form a sufficient audience profile. I also used the internet to research existing texts so that when it eventually came down to construction I had a sound idea of what needed to be done. This was massively advantageous as it meant the research could be done quickly and without much difficulty. Other than this, I used digital media technology for the evaluation- my blog. I used the site ‘Blogger’ which proved to be quite easy to work with; it was simple to upload text and images to form posts. I learnt some very useful things during the overall coursework process. I discovered to what extent images can be manipulated in order to make them hyper real and also just how important the audience is in deciding how to create my magazine according to the genre of music I had chosen.