Second Photoshoot

Planning my Second Photoshoot

This is my plan for my second photoshoot, which I will conduct on Friday. The photographs that I take here will be used on my contents page, and will relate to features within the magazine. Each photograph will be placed on the second page of my table of contents, with the page number written next to it.

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Contents page Mock Up

Planning my Contents page
Here, I have designed the mock up of my contents page. I have used the same colours and font style as my front cover, so that my magazine can be consistent and recognisable by the readers as the school magazine's.

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Magazine Front Cover

Front Cover

This is my front cover for the preliminary task. I created this front cover on Adobe Photoshop, as I feel that this software allows me to use many tools, such as the ability to add different layers, add shadow effects and being able to insert pictures, to create a successful front cover.

Whilst creating this cover, I had to keep many things in mind. Firstly, the colours that I used had to be the school house colours, which are green, white and yellow. I will use these colours throughout my magazine so that I can be consistent. Secondly, I had to bear in mind the rules of third. I purposely placed my model in the two right thirds, to keep the first third empty for the kickers. I also directed my model to hold the notepad quite high, so that I could place the competition box against a plain background and not confuse the viewer. Thirdly, the fonts I used had to be different, but not be too different so that they distract the reader. That is why I chose to only use three different fonts on my cover. This made it interesting yet not too overwhelming.

Mock Up

Creating my Mock Up

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Why did I choose this font style?
I chose the font 'Arial', as I felt that this font style is extremely easy to read by everyone. I need to make sure that it is a clear font to understand, so that the younger members can read the text easily as well as the older students.

Why did I choose the colour green, yellow and white?
These are my house colours. They are also the colours of St Marylebone School, and so by using these throughout, my magazine is easily recognisable as being the school's magazine.

Preliminary Task

Planning my Photoshoot 06/11/08

This is a plan for my photoshoot. It describes what I am going to do for my photoshoot, and what I want to achieve from my photos.

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Photos for Preliminary Task 07/11/08


In this lesson, I took multiple photos for my school magazine front cover. I feel that this task was done quite successfully, however there were some aspects of it that I would change for next time. Firstly, I would have taken many more photos to try and get the most successful photo that I could possibly get. I only took three different photos, which were all taken in the same lighting and position. This wasn’t very varied, and I feel that if I had experimented more, I could have come up with a much more interesting photo with different lighting, stances, facial expressions etc. Also, some of the photos I took were not very appropriate. This one, for example (right), the flash was kept on. This means that there were many shadows around the edges of the wall and around her body. This would have made it difficult for it to be successfully Photoshopped out and edited.Secondly, I would have drawn out my design better. This would have given me a clearer idea as to what I wanted my magazine cover to look like.

Using Brushes 10/10/08

In this lesson, we learnt how to download brushes to create a successful banner and logo for our media blog. We first downloaded a Photoshop brush from a website. I found the website Brusheezy, which allowed me to download brushes for free.
I then started a new Photoshop document from scratch, and adjusted the size to A3. I decided to make my logo and banner using different floral patterns. I made the background a deep blue by filling it with the paint bucket tool. I then loaded my saved brush, changed the paintbrush colour to white, and ‘painted’ where I wanted my flowers to be on my page. I only clicked the mouse once, as this created a sharp and accurate picture of the design that I had chosen.
I then added another layer. This allowed me to draw even more brushes and designs, but I could layer them on top of my previous ones. I then adjusted the blending mode of this layer to luminosity, as this created a very transparent and more subtle effect, which I felt looked extremely professional.
I lastly added my text. I made my name bigger than the text that read ‘Media Blog’, by highlighting the layer that was just my name, and making the font size bigger. I also placed the ‘media blog’ layer below the text layer for my name, so that my name slightly overlapped the other text. This looked made my logo look very professional.
The font I chose was a script font, as I wanted to keep my logo very sophisticated. The font I used was ‘Pristina’. I also made the font white so that it contrasted well against the blue background a stood out.
I also added a drop shadow to both text layers, which just makes my logo look a lot more interesting.
I then created a new document, adjusting the size so that the length is a lot longer that the height. This is my banner. I chose to keep the background colour and used the same brush, as I wanted to achieve a consistent style.

Signs and Semiotics 10/10/08

In this lesson, we learnt about signs and semiotics. I found out that the three main semiotics are icon, symbol and index. Icon is where the sign looks like what it represents, such as a non-smoking sign. This is easily recognisable and the viewer can clearly understand what it means. A symbol needs to be culturally learned, such as a thumb up. Once this symbol is learned, most people will understand what it is. Lastly, an index is suggestive and connected to what they represent, however it can be interpreted in many different ways, for example, smoke is a sign of fire.