3 - How did your production skills develop throughout this project?
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Script One of the key technologies incorporated into this project was online blogging. Before starting Media Studies I didn't know what blogging was but when we were given the task to create a blog on Weebly, I gradually discovered how to use it. I began to post every process I went through in creating my media products, which is shown in the variety of screenshots that I have uploaded. Weebly, as I found out, was simple to use and I could access it at anytime from anywhere, as long as I had internet connection. At first I felt that the most difficult task I had when using Weebly was to insert a document from my desktop. Overall, I found Weebly was very simple to use and helpful when reviewing the process I went through in creating my product.
Photography was another new key skill that I had to learn while creating my magazine. Before developing my skills whilst making this magazine, I had no photographic knowledge. I took my pictures by putting the camera on automatic, pointing and shooting, which is shown in my first photo shoot. Learning about the location in which we were shooting in, was important because elements from the local environment, such as natural lighting levels, needed to be considered. Depth of field is a photography term that refers to how much of the image is in focus. The camera will focus on one distance, but there’s a range of distance in front and behind that point that stays sharp - that’s depth of field. Portraits often have a soft, unfocused background - this is a shallow depth of field. Landscapes, on the other hand, often have more of the image in focus - this is a large depth of field, with a big range of distance that stays sharp. The shorter the depth of field, the larger the aperture (which as I learnt is how wide the shutter opens, consequently controlling how much light you are allowing to reach the field). This allows you to naturally draw the reader’s eyes to the most important part of the picture, which would be the model, contrasting with other depths in a softer focus.
Framing is another important part of photography. We learnt about the rules of thirds and how the photos are often more aesthetic when the model is placed on the third lines as opposed to the middle of the photo.
How to set up a studio and shoot in it correctly was another skill which I learnt about. I learnt how to take proper studio photographs. This included how to use reflectors to manipulate and reflect the light. I also learnt about different lighting setups, including the 3 point lighting setup. Other uses of technology which I integrated within my coursework this year includes photo editing. Photoshop was a tool which I had very limited experience with before starting this magazine project. This meant that I was basically working from scratch. Learning about Photoshop involved many hours of YouTube tutorials learning how to do the basics, such as change the opacity/colour/size of the text or cut out a shape and create a new layer.
Another much slower and more frustrating method of developing my Photoshop skills was trial and error. If something did not work (and it fairly often did not), then I would go back to the drawing board (or YouTube tutorial) and try another way of completing my task. This method was a lot more time consuming than I would have expected. We also had lessons on Photoshop, where we could ask any questions or queries we had. I found that these lessons greatly helped advance my skills. I learnt how to digitally remaster and edit my images, including how to change the RGB balance and what effect that has on my images.