What have I learnt about technologies?

WordpressI chose to use wordpress.com for my online blog where I uploaded all of my portfolio content. I chose wordpress as I was already familiar with blogspot and wanted to try out something new.Through using the site I found that it was incredibly easy to use, with a toolbar down the left hand side of the screen to navigate you around the site as a whole as well as your own blog.

Here is a list of all the posts on your blog. You get the option to edit or delete any of them, even once they’ve been posted. You can also access draft posts, and categorize them.

This another feature which I used a lot. You can upload media files such as images from your desktop or documents into a media bank. This stores all the media you want it too, and then images can be selected from this bank to add into posts. This was useful for me as I took screen shots of many different aspects of Composed magazine and uploaded them all to the bank, so that anytime I needed them they were there, as many times as I needed.

SlideshareI posted both directly onto the blog by using posts, which was very straightforward, and in other forms such as power point and video. I found out very quickly that you couldn’t upload word documents or powerpoints directly onto your blog, so I became familiar with slide share.

Slide share is a website which i’d never heard of or used before now. It allows you to upload your powerpoints and gain a code which you can then use to embed the slideshow onto your blog. Slideshare is really useful and definitely a site that I’ll remember for future use, but it took a bit of trial and error to figure out which code I needed to copy and where to paste it into a blog post so that it would show up correctly on the page.

Cameras&Studio

Being a photography student I was already familiar with who to utilise a studio space and work the camera (used my own). However I did learn more about how to direct a model and relax the person in front of the camera in order to get a more natural shot. I found that by demonstrating what I meant Natalie was much more comfortable copying, and just chatting normally and having a friendly atmosphere helped too.

Photoshop & Indesign

Again, being a photography students I use Photoshop on a daily basis for image manipulation, so I was fairly familiar with how to use all the tools I needed in order to create my cover. However, when it came to making the double page spread I felt that Photoshop wouldn’t be the best programme to use as it’s primarily for images, not pages.

As a result I used Indesign which I’d never used before. I learnt how to place images, create columns which linked to each other, wrap text around an image and change the display quality of images in order to get a really crisp professional finish. I found Indesign quite difficult to work with but in terms of page layout it was definitely a better option than photoshop and I ended up with a design that I was happy with.