Equipment

Camera / Lights To takes images for my magazine, I took my model to one of the media classes in our school and we used a variety of different equiptment such as cameras, lights and whitescreens to mimic a professional photoshoot and create the desired look for my magazine.

I used a Canon SLR camera as it enabled me to take high quality images which is mandatory for any successful magazine. As my magazine needed to be completed to the best of my ability, I felt it was necessary to use a white screen as it allows the audience to focus on the model and nothing else. White screens are effective because they are very simple and plain, and can easily be edited on softwares such as Photoshop to enhance the image. The lights enabled me to change the way my images appeared and allowed me to create the best looking images for my shoot, and the lights also allowed me to cast the shadow I wanted so that the editing process was a lot easier and smoother.
The lights and the SLR camera were the most important to me as they created high quality images which made my magazine look professional and realistic.

 

 

 

Computer software
I am currently using InDesign to create my magazine as it is a lot easier to use than Photoshop (which we used for our GCSE magazines). InDesign enables you to view the document as a magazine and you can use various different tools such as the Master page which quickly and effectively adds the same text to all of the pages. This makes adding page numbers and the website name of the magazine very easy and saves me a lot of time which I can instead use to improve my magazine elsewhere. Paragraph styles has also been very effective as it also saves time and matches the fonts up when necessary.
I used Photoshop to edit the images for my magazine as there is a huge variety of tools that you can use to make the images look more appealing and suitable for the magazine. Photoshop is very widely used by successful magazines in the indistry therefore I felt that it was necessary to use it.
I also used Powerpoints, Word documents and Scribd a lot whilst planning tasks and used Scribd to upload the documents to my blog.
As I am not used to using these programmes, it took quite a while to get the hang of using all of the new tools however it was quite easy once I knew how to use them.