Studio Photography & Image Production Lab 1- Blog

This picture was used to show light all over the persons face. Although he was turned facing the window, You could see his entire face. I also like the fact that I was also able to show my skill of auto focus, by focusing on the person and blurring the back round.

The second photo I took was when the person is facing the camera. This was meant to show that because he is beside the window, his right part of his face is lit and it gets darker the further you go to the left of his face. This photo came out perfect and it also introduced auto focus which I had learned in the previous lecture.

  
I took this photo outside. I did this to get better lighting. While outside I used these big shiny things called "Diffusers", "Filters" and "Reflectors".  We used a silver one which was called a reflector because it reflected the light from it to another object, in the this case the student. This was helpful because it allow to aim the light anywhere we wanted on the students face. In this case we reflected it onto the left side of his face.

When taking this photo I used a diffuser. This was a gold colour instead of a silver colour like the reflector. What this does is is disperse the light evenly. This causes the light to completely cover the persons face.

Intro to Digital Media- Mission 3: Digital journalism - 3

After having presented our project to the class I feel I have had a lot of time to reflect on how each stage of the project went. The stages: planning, process and post presentation. While doing this mission Digital Photography, I learned that when you use other sources that you do not own you have to mention and reference them in the description box. This became evident after the video was uploaded to the public. After the first four hours of the public having access to watch the video, it got taken down for copyright claims. Another thing I learned was you cannot download videos from YouTube if their channel is associated with a company. For example, the channel FA Premier League is a channel who’s videos you can’t download. You can’t download’s videos from this channel because the premier league owns all the rights. I learned when I tried to download them on “Y2Mate” and got no access to them. 

What I discovered about my mission while doing it was that most people who are you still use newspaper as well as digital apps and websites to find out about football. This proves that Digital Journalism has not taken over the older sources of news but instead enhanced how many ways we can find info and how much we can find it. I also discovered that there is a lot of respect involved in English football. I found this out when I was researching the videos, because at the end of every match, the players and the managers shake hands with everyone. Even Jurgen Klopp, who is the manager of Liverpool will always go over to the opposing team if he managed them and gives them a hug. This shows even though, during the 90 minutes in the they are enemies, there will always be a form of respect on it. 

Although it was overall a success, there were some minor failures that had occurred along the way over the past few weeks. Some of these were the fact that our video got removed from YouTube.

 We had only a few hours to make the second project because our first one failed. This put us into quite a panic because we were there thinking “great, the project is now finished. I’m going to go home and finish the rest of my assignments”. But then we receive an email that our video had gotten a copyright claim from the official FA Premiere League company. This was terrible because we ended up having to stay in college for another 9 - 10 hours researching new information, making a new project, editing a new project on Premiere Pro, exporting that video and then uploading this video before the deadline. Although we had gotten all that finished around 10 o’ clock that night, we still had a technical error and could not upload it. So even though we had uploaded our new project 6 hours late we had still received an above average passing grade. 

I was very proud of this because we could have just said we don’t need the third mission because we all had a passing grade from the last two missions. But instead of doing that we made two projects and passed the module. 

Intro to Digital Media- Mission 3: Digital journalism - 2

After all the planning we had to get to work on producing and making the artefact. So, we started with the original idea of the YouTube video. For this we each had a task. 

My role was to research the champions leagues highlights and download them and email them to Eamonn. While doing this I had to also search for the champions crowd of supporters celebrating as well as background music. While I was doing that Godzy’s job was to search for facts on each match as well as searching for facts on football journalism back in the day in comparison to today. Eamonn’s job was to cut down the clips and put them in order in Adobe Premiere Pro and we all talked about the editing to each other. He also had to alter the volume of the background music we had put into the video. 

To do this I looked at a screenshot of the Premiere League matches and searched on YouTube. I had to get them off channels that weren’t official like FA Premiere League. I also had to pick music so to do this, I decided to pick the song “Centuries” by Fall Out Boy but a remixed version for the background music.

After we had finished adding the videos, music, facts and scored into Premiere Pro, we decided to edit and export it. At this point we had encountered a problem. The problem we had encountered was that it would save on the computer. So, after trying to export it for the final and 50^th time we decided to just upload it to a YouTube channel. Considering I was the only one that had a YouTube channel we decided to render and upload it there. This was fine for the first three hours but after that I received an email about how our video was removed from YouTube because of a copyright claim. This was because we didn’t have a description. This meant we couldn’t give credit.

So, after we had to find another way to convey the knowledge, we had obtained from the research we did. We decided to make a PowerPoint, screen record it and do a voice over for it. To do this we rehearsed it by using a stopwatch and when we finally got the times correct, we were going to screen record the PowerPoint and record our voices at the same time. We screen recorded us going through the PowerPoint using the “QuickTime Player” application my MacBook. We used voice memos on our smart phones to record our voices talking over it.

I also made a survey using an app called “Survey Monkey”.  This is an easy to use application because it gives you options on what types of questions to ask: yes or no, open ended, multiple choice, etc. I sent this to all my social media groups and gave them four hours before I checked the result.

After we had finished the recording the screen and finished recording our voices and roughly got it down to 5 minutes and 9 seconds, we decided to put it into Adobe Premiere Pro and cut it down to the right time length (5 minutes max.). Then I had to research background music while Eamonn and Godzy worked on the editing. I chose a Lo-Fi song to use. After we uploaded the file.

Intro to Digital Media- Mission 3: Digital journalism - 1

The first thing I did before I started before I chose the mission I was going to do, for the methodology project, was read through each and try to find one that would spite my interest. After looking through for quite some time, I had picked my topic of interest. I picked Digital Journalism. I had chosen this topic because I had always liked journalism and everyone uses it these days instead of other forms like newspaper.

Next I had to find a group of people who shared this same interest as me for digital journalism. I found two guys because the maximum amount of members in each group was 3 people. The next thing we had to think about was what was the video going to be about and how we would insert digital journalism into it. After a few minutes of brainstorming we eventually found a topic to do our project and how to include Digital Journalism in it. We decided to do our project on the “Premiere League”.

We decided to give the question: Has Football Journalism changed for the better” to the public.

The next thing we had to do as part of the planning stage was to brainstorm ideas on how to get evidence for the question to be answered. How we would use digital journalism in this project. The best way to word the question to all age groups who would answer and how to present the video.

We had originally planned to make a video about each match of every week of the Premiere League. In these vids it would show the teams walking out, the best goal from that video and the managers shaking hands at the end of the matches. In between each video there was information about the match that would relate to the topic of journalism. I would search the matches in order and find music to play in the background so it would be a little bit out of the ordinary. While I did this the other guys would research information about each match and the history and good facts about Digital Journalism nowadays in comparison to journalism thirty years ago. This was a good system because we got lots of work done within a few hours. After all the information was collected we emailed it all to one computer. Then we all sat around the one computer, opened premiere pro and began editing.

We ended up editing this for about eight hours. But sadly after being up on YouTube for 2 hours it got removed. So we decided to make a screen recording of our project with our voices over it and some back round music. 

I presented the question to people so we could see public reactions on the screen recording. Then  decided a good way to get answers out of people was create a survey they could take. This was a good idea because a survey is one hundred percent anonymous. This would help persuade people to take it because they wouldn't be worried about their information and opinions getting out there with their name. After I would make this survey I would check all the results after a few hours. 

Lab 8 Auto Focus

This is a photo I took in the Auto Focus setting (AF). I went as close as possible to the flower and zoomed in and looked through the viewfinder. I then rested my index finger on the shutter button until it was in focus. Then when it was in focus, I snapped the shot.

This was a photo I took using the continuous Auto focus setting (AF-C). In this photo I was trying to demonstrate and show how to focus on a subject that is moving i.e. a person walking. This was a staged photo.

 This photo was also taken in the Auto Focus setting (AF). In this photo a subject that is dominated by regular Geometric patterns. I did this by choosing a building with the windows being in a consistent pattern. The pattern became abstract with the angle I took the photo in.

Into to Digital Media, Mission 2 - YouTubing (Reflection)

Firstly, I think this presentation is definitely a lot better than my last mission GIF’s. With that in my mind, there was still points to be improved on. I enjoyed doing this mission on YouTubing because I had to learn how to use a software called “Final Cut Pro”. I used this because it was a pre- installed editing software on my Mac. I learned the skill to make my video for YouTube. I learned how to: cut clips and move them around the timeline, add music, delete and duplicate frames, add effects, add text and change the quality from 140p to 720p or 1080p. This was good because considering if you edit a clip in a video it is then yours. I also wanted the quality, so I ended up getting a 720p video. I also learned how to render and upload a video to YouTube. This was very helpful because I would like to start this as a hobby. I also learned how to screenshot on my MacBook. I am using now to show screenshots of my presentation and YouTube channel in the vlogs. I learned all this by researching and watching tutorials, and as ironic as it sounds, on YouTube. 

 

A few things I discovered while doing this was that it would take a lot more work and a lot more time than I had anticipated. This was great because it showed me and gave a great insight to the skill you need to be a YouTuber and what my favorite YouTubers do every day before they render and upload the final product to YouTube. I also discovered a few things. I discovered that I already knew most editing thing skills that software’s require you to have. This was very helpful in the editing stage of the mission. I also figured that a lot more people knew a lot about YouTube like me. This is one thing I wouldn’t have ever expected. This was handy because I wouldn’t be embarrassed to say anything, I thought we should include in the mission because they were like-minded people like me. I discovered that you shouldn’t include as much History and should always include an intro or contents and an outro or conclusion.  

In this mission we had a lot of successes and failures.  One of the successes my group had was we had very little errors. We had a lot less errors than in our last mission on gifs. This was due to the fact we were more prepared, and we put more work into it. This was also because in the last mission we did GIF’s. This didn’t give us a lot of space to explore and that much to write about. We could still talk for eight minutes, but we ended up including unimportant information. Not only this, it also affected our blogs. It affected our blogs in the way that we had a lot of trouble writing five hundred words for each blog. We also didn’t have as much pictures and didn’t rehearse. This made us default to just reading what people could already read on the PowerPoint.  

 The aspects I was most proud of in this project was the quality of our YouTube video and the design we put into our channel name. I think was because we spend a good chunk of time editing our videos to make them the best we could. 

Into to Digital Media, Mission 2 - YouTubing (Presentation)

I decided to create a YouTube compilation, as that was our community for our YouTube channel. My compilation was going to be of “fast workers”. As I did a compilation of fast workers the other two people in my group did a “Fails Compilation” and a “Beauty” Compilation. I used a software called “Final Cut Pro” to edit my YouTube video. This was an easy enough to use software as it came pre- installed on the Mac Book. It was also very easy to use.  It was a very useful software as you just had to drop the video into the timeline and then use could do anything to the clips. Cut parts out of it, add music, add graphics, split and merge clips together and then finally preview and export it to any social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube).  Then we had upload every video to YouTube. This was a very easy process because YouTube guides you on every step. Although it can take a few minutes to an hour to render the video it’s an important step because this will give your video better quality, stop buffering and create no lag. Even though it will take a while you could go away and do something else while you’re waiting. After the video is 100% rendered, it brings you to another page. On this page you have to give your video a title, description, cite sources you used and set an age limit to it. The editing and research took up most of the time, meanwhile the uploading stage was the easiest part.

After all the videos were created we had to get to work  on the PowerPoint presentation. We used Microsoft PowerPoint to make this, not only because it was simple but also because it was on every computer in the school. For this we decided we would each have the same number of slides each. We had 12 slides including the slide based on each one of our videos. This meant we would each have 4 slides to present. This would be fair as we all had the same amount of slides to talk about. We decided we would each choose three from the topics: Historical moments, history, our channel analytics in comparison to a bigger channel, genres, and the biggest trend of each year from the beginning of YouTube. As well as the three other slides we would talk about we had our own slide focused completely on our YouTube video. For this slide we would talk about the research of the videos, the software we used, the editing process and the uploading process.  After that we would have to answer any questions anyone would have. We were meant to make the presentation last eight minutes max. But instead we ended up getting twelve minutes. This would have been avoided if we had rehearsed more before we presented our project. The sources we would use for research was: Social Blade, YouTube, Wikipedia and Google images. We referenced all this in the presentation.