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

From constructing my products, one of the technologies I have learned about is Photography. I Have never really took "serious" photos before so this was new for me. I used a high quality Olympus camera to take my photos, and I watched a 10 minute DVD that came with the camera in order to use it effectively. One of the keys things I learned is to make sure you take a lot of photos, certainly a lot more than you need. Even if you think one photo looks perfect, it's always best to take several more anyway just in case your other Photo does not turn out quite as good as you think. The more Photos you take, the more chance you have of getting one that you want. On the night I went out with my friend to take photos, I took 25 photos and only used 4 of them (The others were photos I had previously taken of friends). Two of the 4 I used were not the photos I originally planned to use, but actually turned out better. This is why it is so valuable to take considerably more photos than you think you will need. Unless you have a particularly specific idea in mind, I would also consider it important to take photos with a variety of backgrounds. The genre of my music fits in with an "urban" look, and I live in a small country village, so I had to think about my locations a little more carefully. To start with, I took photos looking down a road. We then moved to some garages, and then to the factory which is also conveniently placed in my village. These locations gave me the urban look I needed. Since the factory had a lot of lights, it was also better to do that photo shoot at night, when it was dark.

Two of the internet applications I have had to use and learn are Flickr and Blogger. I had never used ether of these websites nor anything similar, so they have both been a new experience for me.
Although a little confusing at first, I learned the layout of blogger quite quick and I am now very comfortable with using it. The most important things I have learned would be how to use "Labels" and generally finding my way around the website. Since blogger is the website which my entire project is on, it has allowed me to keep adding things as I go along, which is very important. One distinct disadvantage of using a free blog hosting website would be the picture size limit. In my Final products section, my Products are somewhat compressed, and therefore have lost some of their quality. Also, in these sections where you add you your blog, they way in which you add and organize photos is very awkward. You cannot place a photo exactly where you want it, and sometimes the photo will be in a different place within the "Edit" screen than it is when you look and the published version on the blog. Overall however, blogger has given me all the options I to create my project.

Flickr has also been useful for annotating photos. As I write this I have not used it all that much, but when I have done it has been very simple to use. Like Blogger, I had never used a website like Flickr before - but it is very simple to import photos and annotate them effectively. I have used ti to annotate my own projects aswell as other magazines and it has broadened my knowledge of the websites available for a project such as this.

As mentioned in my "Skills Development" section, I have also learned a lot about Adobe Photoshop CS4. Before this project, I had only very briefly used it and thus was not capable of creating professional looking pieces of work. Now I am capable of doing so, and I am very comfortable with using Photoshop. Most of the things I have learned I have learned from just using Photoshop and finding things out by myself, or by using Google.

Google has also helped me in this project. I have used it to search for many things, including institutional data, photos for my Moodboard, and other information and help about target audiences. I also used google to find out about Vibe magazine in the first place, which has been an influence throughout my project.