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

  As already mentioned I have learnt a lot about editing the pictures that I have taken for the music magazine. I have discovered that it is much easier to used the Internet website 'Clipping Magic' to remove the background from my images farther than using Microsoft' PowerPoint. I learnt much about Clipping Magic and how to use it as there was a step-by-step instructions available when you first visit the website. from this website i have also learnt that it is possible to remove the background from an image but keep the hair in, so that it looks natural and not like huge chunks of the model's hair is missing. Below is an analogy of what I learnt from the website.

  From working on the music magazine I also developed my skills of working with a camera. I decided to use my own camera for the photography because I am more familiar with it and how to use it as oppose to the school cameras, for this reason I felt that my own would be easier to use, in addition the school cameras are camcorders so I felt that that may make using a school camera more complicated. When using my camera to take the pictures I noticed that square shapes focused on the models faces which was useful in capturing the girls' facial expressions.
   During the production of the product I have also developed skills and knowledge of Microsoft Word and Publisher. I found it easier to type text into a Word document and then paste it into the Publisher document that I used to create the magazine. I found it very easy to use Publisher to produce my music magazine. From the process I have learnt that Publisher gives you the opportunity to add pages to the one document, enabling me to produce the whole magazine in the same document rather than numerous ones. I also discovered that Publisher gives you the opportunity to  create a double page spread within the document which makes it a lot easier to work with, it does this by placing two single pages next to each other.

Look at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

  I feel that since producing the preliminary task at the start of the year I have drastically developed my photography skills and editing the images that I have taken. In September I joined the media class later than the rest of the pupils and have never studied media in the past, for this reason I felt like I had been thrown in at the deep end as pretty much straight away I was presented with the task of producing my school magazine. One factor of producing the magazine that I was particularly worried about was producing the images to a professional standard. before I took the images however, in class we studied camera angles and shots and were given the opportunity to take our own pictures demonstrating medium close ups and low angle shots for example. We were also told that the lighting was an important factor to take into consideration when taking our photography, however, at the time I don't think that I fully took on board how important the camera angles and lighting would be for the final presentation of the magazine and I did not appreciate how much of and impact they would have on the representation of the magazine. Below is an image of my book and what we were told to do for a strong photo.

  I took the images that I have used for the school magazine in  one of the school's classrooms and used a  white pull down projector screen as the background because I thought that it would be the perfect background as there would be no glare reflected off it from the lights and I believed that it would present me with a perfect white background that would be easily removed. However when I came to add the images to the magazine I stumbled across numerous issues. the first being that because I had not managed the lighting correctly the background was patchy and cast a shadow behind the models. This then turned into an issue when I wanted to remove the background from the images, because the background colour was not one block colour I was unable to remove it using Microsoft PowerPoint. I spent quite a lot of time attempting to resolve this issue however after a while I decided to search the internet to try and find a website to help me complete this task. The website that i found was called 'Clipping Magic'. Looking back this was much easier to used than attempting to remove the background using Microsoft PowerPoint. Below is a screenshot of the website and an image that i was editing using the website.