Magazine Front Cover

Photography Evaluation
I used manual focus when taking the photos, I learned how to use the zoom and focus rings, since I had no prior knowledge considering I usually use auto focus.
I took my images landscape when they were supposed to be portrait, however this did not create any significant problems as the dimensions of the front cover still allowed me to use the photo I wanted, but I had to position the image so that only the least important parts of the photo were not seen.
A lot of the images I took at first were out of focus, so I had to get used to using the focus rings, and then the majority of my images after this were fine, so overall I would say that they were in focus, although I do think that I could improve the focus of my images.
In terms of lighting, after experimenting with side and front lighting, I decided that side was the best to use for my magazine cover.

Side Lighting

Front Lighting

After taking images using both of these types of lighting I decided that I much preferred the side lighting, meaning that for the rest of my shots I looked at the position of the sun and moved to an area where the light was coming from the side in my images.

For the background of my magazine I decided that I wanted a brick wall to give a sort of underground look to the image. This did not cause any problems when taking the image. I also had o think about what my background would look like with the colour scheme I wanted, and I thought that a brick wall background would be appropriate for a black white and pink colour scheme.

Katie and I met in lesson, however I don't consider myself to have people skills problems so Katie and I got along fine so it was easy to take the images, however the fact that we did get along well meant that we could of been a little more focused when taking the images, but overall the shoot was good.

Photoshop Evaluation

The tools I used on Photoshop were the text tool, black and white, FX, and the shape tool. Generally I found the tools on photoshop quite easy to use once I figured out what to do with them, I did not find any of them particularly difficult to use. I would consider my text to be well controlled, I used simple colours and the strokes were easy to use and control to the amount that I wanted. My images were not cut out and the only effect I used were black and white on the image, I did this by placing the black and white layer above the image layer and then adding my text on top of the black and white layer. I did not download any fonts, I used the ones already provided in photoshop. The colours I used were black, white and pink, this is because I wanted my magazine to be black and white with some text contrasting against it, I wanted my magazine to still look quite underground, with a punk feel and I thought that using pink for the writing would be good for this effect, especially since my model is a girl and pink is associated with girls. If I were to improve anything about my magazine cover, I would improve the image because I took it landscape instead of portrait so the top of Katie's head got chopped off, and also  the sides of the image are not on the cover because of the dimensions of the A4 cover. I think the strengths of my magazine are the colour scheme and the layout.