Question 6- Technologies
While I have been working on the music magazine project I have predominantly used photo shop for my work and blogger as a way of posting it. However I didn’t use flickr for annotating my work because I feel it is easier to explain you work, and show why you made the choices that you made if the work is formatted as a body of text, plus I think it helps improve the presentation of the work and it is not necessary to tag the masthead if that is what I am talking about because it is made clear in what I say about it.
I really enjoyed creating the pages of my magazine, as the creative side is something I would be interested in pursuing as a career. As a photographer it was great to be able to explore new ways in using photoshop especially in a more commercial and technical context.
The reason I enjoyed it so much was because I was able to experiment with how professionals use photoshop to perfect photos. I used the blemish healer or ‘aribrush’ tool because I wanted the skin of the people in my photos to look completely clear like that of a professional magazine without adjusting the colours and contrast too much so that the skin was simply pale I wanted to remove all blemishes on the models face and chest and anything unsmooth about the picture for instance in my original image the background wall is not completely plain white, but I was able to correct this using the software. As well as this I used pipette colouring to even the skin tone around they eyes and mouth with I think has worked really well to give a polished finish to all the photos to ensure that there are not unwanted shadows ender the eyes and mouth. I was also able to remove any hair or lines that I thought didn’t add to the picture and removed the reflections of the badge onto the peak of the cap.

To fill the eyelashes of ‘The Sergeant’ on both the cover and the two page spread I simply used a thin paint tool used a pipette to obtain the colours of the other lashes and filled them in to make them appear longer and most importantly thicker as it gave a greater sense of drama to the eye. I used the blur tool to ensure that all of the adjustments that I had made looked natural and didn’t interrupt with the overall texture of the image which I found happened a lot especially when airbrushing. The most important thing for me was attempting to have an almost entirely perfect image with no imperfections, which almost looked completely unedited. It is a very fine line but I think I have managed to achieve an image that is both aesthetically pleasing and dramatic, but still believable as a photo. Here is a photo of model Alice Dellal and it clear that the cheek has been over edited as it slightly distorted and does not look natural this is what can happen if a key facial feature is over airbrused e.g. her cheekbone/jawline, it is difficult to explain so I have highlighted it with a red ring.
Also I would not have been able to find all of the fonts and styles that have resulted in being so key to my work had it not been for photoshop. The typography is what makes a magazine and it can be very influential on how a piece of writing is received by the audience to whom it is directed and as media producers it is important that our audience get the intended reading of what we write.
As a photography student I found the photo shoot a lot of fun especially as I was able to work with polly who is so pretty and works so well with the camera. It was very interesting for me to take these posed ‘studio shots’ because I am usually much more inclined to real life photography especially when it comes to portraits, however I really enjoyed setting up these shots and trying different costume combinations, different backgrounds and even different cameras. I am so, so pleased with my final two images of ‘The Sergeant’ that feature in the magazine, I think the ‘frank’ direct photos are great for this piece because they reflect the character and the article. This is why I didn’t use any of my photos that used different angles, and more complex poses because I felt It was unnecessary to detract from the model herself, and what I really wanted to was capture her essence in its entirety.



Blogger has been good because it means that work can be edited once it has been posted, which has been really helpful because it means if you publish a piece of analysis and realise that there is a point you can go back and add whatever it is that has been missed out. However when I’m working I do like to have hard copies of all my work as it much easier to compare work and analyse work when it is on sheets of paper that you can move and arrange and lay out on a desk, however it does mean that you have to re-type and re-print work if you want to make adjustments to it.