Question 6:

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?My skills in using a Digital SLR camera have improved significantly since the ancillary project. The main image on the cover of my ancillary magazine was out of focus and the natural lighting and ISO setting on the camera washed out the image and made it look flat. I have improved these problems in my final product by using a studio which has soft box lighting and by altering the ISO settings on my camera in manual mode so that they were best suited to the type of lighting in the studio. This gave my images more clarity and depth.

My ancillary project cover (left) and final cover (right)

Before I began my ancillary project I had not used Photoshop before so I found it difficult to navigate. I used basic fonts and shapes and hardly edited my photographs for my ancillary project because of this. When I started to produce my final products, however, I had become used to the software and therefore found it much easier to edit my photographs and import font styles from websites such as dafont.com. I felt more confident using tools such as the polygonal lasso tool to remove the background from my images and then edit them using the hue and saturation and brightness and contrast tools to create a brighter, warmer feel. By overcoming the difficulties of first using Photoshop I was able to create better quality photographs and pages of a higher standard.

I had never created a blog or used the site Blogger before I began the course so uploading my work onto the site was new and challenging for me. At first, I found getting around the site and determining when to switch between compose and HTML when uploading documents difficult. However, with practise, I soon became comfortable with using the site and uploading my work. Through the use of the site, I have discovered that, due to technological convergence, I can compose pieces of work and present them in a chronological order from the same site. This is useful because it allows me to keep all of my work in one place and edit it if I need to without having to navigate between several sites.

I felt that Slideshare was one of the easiest sites to familiarise myself with. From it I have learned how to quickly turn a Word or PowerPoint document into a short presentation which I can transfer onto my blog through an embedded code. The use of the site Slideshare enabled me to appropriately present my work on my blog quickly and to a deadline without having to use several sites. This is possible because of technological convergence.