Michaela's Blog IS30240

Image found at http://www.clipartpanda.com/clipart_images/computer-guy-clip-art-8087349

This is our final week of the module ‘Creating and Publishing Digital Media’. I have really enjoyed this module and I have learned a huge range of useful techniques and methods to use in creating a blog or webpage.

During the module and in the posts on our blogs, some of the content we have explored includes how to set up your own blog and the various websites that enable you to do so; an introduction to HTML code; techniques to capture an effective photograph using various tools and effects; how to create our own audio podcasts by recording ourselves, editing it and uploading it to social media; how to create digital presentations creatively and effectively to get our message across; information regarding copyright, search engine optimisation and social media.

I have found this module, setting up my own blog and continuously adding to my blog extremely rewarding because it brings all of the work we have done together in one space for us to see and to refer back to.

Image found at http://ewebdesign.com/flat-social-media-icons/

This week we have been learning about how to engage the audience of your blog using social media. This can be done by adding ways that your audience can engage with your blog using social media. In doing this, the audience’s opinions are included in the blog and also your blog is being promoted. Social media can hugely benefit you blog because it can provide publicity, customer service, loyalty, collaboration, networking and thought-leadership in your blog.

Ways to use social media to promote your blog or website could include, setting up a ‘Facebook’ page or profile for your blog, adding a ‘like box’ to your blog or website, setting up a ‘Twitter’ profile, ‘YouTube’ channel, and other profiles on various social media sites.

After creating these profiles, it is important to create new posts regularly, respond to comments and feedback, friend and follow other people and pages.

This week we have been learning about ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ (SEO). This involves improving the visibility of a website in the ranking system of search engine result pages, such as ‘Google’, ‘Bing’ and ‘Yahoo’. These result pages use an index of keywords in their ranking system, so by highlighting keywords in your blog, your blog becomes easier to locate and more likely to come up in results when people search for terms that are used in your site.

Keyword tools, such as ‘Google AdWords’, ‘’Keyword Planner’ and ‘WordTracker’, can be used to measure the value of terms used in your blog, so that you know which words are more or less useful to include in your blog. It is useful to make a list words relating to your site, and then to include them in a mission statement in the ‘about’ page of your blog. Keywords can be used throughout your blog in descriptions, tags and content.

Copyright

This week we have been learning about copyright and property. This means respecting the right of the copyright holder for images and their work. The copyright holder has rights to be credited for their work, to decide who can adapt their work, who can perform it, financially benefit from it etc. It is similar to plagiarism in that it means that a person cannot use someone else’s work in their own, without referencing them properly.

We had to go through our blogs and ensure that all of the images or videos, which we had included in our posts, were properly referenced. For example, my podcast referenced the source of the background music used in the podcast, and also referenced the source of the poem I was reading. Images can simply be referenced by included a link to its original source underneath the image. For example:

This image was found at: http://publiseek.tumblr.com/post/33826248875/pr101photographers

It is important to respect copyright so that people get attributed and respected for their own work, rather than someone else.

Our class has been working on our photography brief of six images for our portfolio. The theme of my portfolio is music. I wanted to base my photographs on something I enjoy, so I chose the theme of music. I love music and play piano, my sister plays the violin and my brother has taken up the saxophone, so we have these instruments at home for me to photograph.

The instruments were actually quite difficult to photograph and it took a long time to achieve photos that I was happy with the composition. I decided to take a close photo of the keys of the piano, rather than the whole instrument, because the keys are more detailed, and I found that further away images contained too much black and space.

I enjoyed photographing the saxophone because the make up of it is so complicated and it has so many different buttons and parts. I added effects to the photos such as cropping and increasing the contrast in order to enhance the shine of the saxophone’s surface.

I photographed the violin at an angle to highlight the length of the instrument and strings stretching back. The lines of this instrument provided interesting diagonals in the photos.

https://prezi.com/jvmb1klgdxip/how-to-create-an-audio-podcast/

I created a presentation using prezi.com. The subject of my presentation is how to create a podcast. I wanted to make the Prezi easy to follow, so I thought it would be cool to make it into a comic book story called ‘The Incredible Podcast Woman’.I think it is important to make the presentation colourful and interesting in order to engage with the viewer.

Video tutorials and audio effects can make the presentation more interesting. For example, in the final scene we see ‘Podcast Woman’ listening to her finished podcast. I drew a picture of my character, which I photographed and uploaded and put a symbol of an iPod into her hand. I then placed a photo screenshot of my podcast page on top of the iPod and then added my mp3 audio as background music to this scene as if the character is really listening to the podcast.

Prezi allows you to create a pathway of which scene is seen first and in which order. I thought this was great because I could make a pathway so that the boxes are read as if reading a comic book. I was also able to zoom in on writing and important parts of the presentation to make it more clear.

I really enjoyed making the Prezi because the process was creative and prezi.com allows great freedom to make the presentation as imaginative and detailed as you like.

This week we have been learning about digital imaging and how to use effects to enhance your photography. We particularly focused on effects such as cropping, rotating, retouching, colour correcting, resizing and optimizing images.

There are different programs available to enhance your photographs, which can be downloaded to your computer, such as ‘Adobe PhotoShop’, ‘GIMP’, ‘Pixelr’ and ‘Picasa’.

Our task this week was to select an restoration challenge image from the website ‘ReTouchPro’ and to fix the image as best we could using ‘Picasa’.

This is the image I selected. The image was torn around the edges, rust stains and shadowing.

Firstly, I used the retouch tool to get rid of all of the rust stains all over the image. I was able to zoom in in order to see the stains more clearly. I also used the retouching tool to even out fold marks and soften shadowing. I cropped the photo to get rid of uneven edges around it. Some of the tools I used to adjust the image were fill light, highlights, shadows and colour temperature. These helped to make the image clearer and to soften shadowing. I was also able to add a frame to make the image appear more professional and to draw attention to the image.

This the image after using these effects.

http://creatingandpublishing.podomatic.com/ This is a link to my audio podcast. I decided to read a poem called ‘The Blogger’s Lament’, by Brit, which I found on the blog dailyduck@blogspot.ie. It can be found at this address:http://dailyduck.blogspot.ie/2006/08/roll-over-betjeman-and-tell-walt.html. The background music is from freemusicarchive.org and is called ‘Long long letter’, by Pianochocolate. This week our audio podcasts are due to appear on our blogs. I enjoyed making the podcast and I am happy with it now it is finished. I used various functions in ‘Audacity’ in order to manipulate the recording. These include the noise removal tool to remove ambient noise, cropping, normalizing, compressor and fade in and out at the beginning and end of the recording. I decided to add background music to the audio to create more atmosphere and to make the audio more interesting to listen to. I imported the background music by first downloading the music from freemusicarchive.org to iTunes. Firstly I downloaded a different song with vocals, however the vocals were distracting against the poem. I tried to crop the vocals out of the music, however the music sounded disjointed then, which was also distracting. I then chose a different instrumental song for the background music and cropped it to fit the voice recording with fades at the beginning and end also. The ‘Audacity’ software is straight forward to use once you get used to it but it can be quite fiddly. At one stage by accident I must have pressed something to make my voice slow way down and sound really deep, which sounded funny but it took a while to fix. I then exported the whole recording as an mp3 file and uploaded it as a podcast to my Pod-o-matic page.

 

This week we also had to take two photographs to demonstrate how shifting between portrait and landscape view can improve the framing of an image. To demonstrate this I took two photographs of plates displayed on a wall, one in portrait view and one in landscape view.

In portrait view we can see all of the plates, however, the air vent on the wall is also in the frame.

Whereas, in landscape view, the plates are framed better because all of the plates are visible, however the air vent in not in view.

This week we have been continuing working on our audio podcasts which will be due next week. We can use different subjects for our audio, for example we can read a poem, text, post from our blog or speak about our experience in the module so far, as long as the audio is between two and three minutes in length. I decided to read a poem I found online called’ The Blogger’s Lament’, by Brit, which is from a blog called dailyduck.blogspot.ie. I decided to read this poem out because I thought it was suited to the module since it is about the role of an internet blogger, and fellow students in the module can relate to the poem since we are all in the process of blogging ourselves. I downloaded ‘Audacity’ in order to record myself reading the poem.

 

This week we also had to take two photos to demonstrate our understanding of shutter speed. The camera I am using (Samsung NV4) does not allow you t change shutter speed manually, although it automatically changes shutter speed with the amount of light there is when the photo is being taken. Hence, to carry out this task, I took two photos of water running out of a tap, one with a light shining onto it, and one with darker light.

The photo with less light had slower shutter speed, which meant that only the more still parts of the image remain clear.

The photo with more light had faster shutter speed, which allowed for clearer capturing of fast movement.

Photography

This week our class has been learning about digital photography. Our task for this week is to take two photographs, with different apertures, to demonstrate our understanding of the use of aperture in photography. Aperture sounds complicated, however, it simply refers to the opening ‘iris’ at the front of the camera, where light passes through.

Aperture is measured in f-stops, such as f 16, f 5.6, f 2.8 etc. A higher number of f stops means that depth of field in the photograph gets deeper (more object are in focus, closer or further away from the lens). Similarly, a lower number of f stops means that objects in the foreground are in focus, whereas the objects further back are less in focus.

My camera is a ‘Samsung NV4’. Unfortunately for this exercise, this camera does not allow the user to manually change the aperture. Instead the aperture automatically widens with light, so that in brightly lit areas the camera has a high number of f stops, whereas if it is dark, it has a lower number of f stops. Because of this, I took one photograph of my phone on top of notes and then another photograph of the same subject matter, but with a light shining over the composition.

This is the first photograph I took, in darker light. This meant that the aperture had a lower number of f stops, so the phone is in focus, whereas the writing on the page is not.

In this second photograph, a reading light is shining onto the composition. This meant that the aperture had a higher number of f stops, so the phone is in focus, but the writing on the page is in focus also.