- How closely did you stick to your planning? What were the challenges in doing this?
In my magazine I stuck closely to the theme of an Art Edition of a school magazine including pictures of work by students in the contents and stories of successful artists on the front cover. The featured ‘model’ (Louis Leighton) could have been linked to the theme of art through him painting or dressed like an artist of some description. The challenges with cover photo’s were getting the right shadows, the right sized shot (medium close up) and making the photo’s concise and link. Photo shop was another challenge, cropping and shaping pictures and manipulating the light within the photo was difficult and required extra lunch time photo shop lessons to complete.
- Did you find the planning helpful? Why?
For my pre-lim I only had a rough concept for my cover and context and then I went around the school looking for inspiration and photo’s that linked to my theme. Having a theme helped me because otherwise the magazine wouldn’t have a direction and would look unprofessional.
- How did you find the process of finding and cropping your original image?
Cropping the cover image was fairly straight forward, but cutting objects out of pictures was a lot more difficult. Using the ‘lasso’ tool was difficult to highlight the desired parts of the photo and often left a rough edge.
- How easy was it to manipulate your image using photo shop?
Lightening and darkening the photo was quite simple but I didn’t try removing imperfections on the cover photo, which would have made it look a lot more professional than it currently does.
- What have you learnt from the process about creating covers and contents pages?
I have learnt the mise-en-scene of the photo is crucial as the more successful covers in the class included interesting or relevant props, locations and models. I have also learnt that to produce a professional piece of work you need to remove any imperfections in the photo’s and use appropriate fonts, cover stories and mast heads. And finally I have learnt that the planning process is very vital and I will have improve on this in the future.
- What would you do differently next time?
Before I next produce another cover I will have to learn to use Photoshop to a competent level as to be able to manipulate my photos to higher standard. And as I mentioned before the planning process will have to be improved upon to get the best grade. I felt that the pre-lim was rushed as I had problems saving my work and had to restart, so perhaps spending more time on the work would result in a more successful cover and contents.
