Preparing For The CCR

 Preparing For The CCR

During early February, we started to discuss our CCR, or our Creative Critical Reflection for component one. The day this was discussed I was sadly absent, however, I still managed to research the topic on my own. There are four questions we're to be asked and to answer, here they are below:

• How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?
• How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?
• How did your production skills develop throughout this project?
• How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online – in this project

Since I wasn't able to take notes at the time, here's a picture of the assignment we'll have to work on in the Canvas website.

Why Do Headlines Really Matter?

 Why Do Headlines Really Matter?

 Headlines are underrated, in my opinion. Of course everyone is going to logically say they're important, but how important are they? Well, they're what grabs a reader's attention. A headline is made of two parts, a teller and a teaser. The teller is a small bit of information on the topic, while the the teaser is what attracts the reader's attention. You can have all kinds of hooks in a teaser, like onomatopoeias and puns, personal favorites.
There are several kinds of headlines though, as follows:

- Wicket, two or more secondary lines above the primary
- Tripod Pattern, two or more secondary lines beside the primary
- Kicker, one line of secondary above the primary
- Hammer Pattern, and one or more secondary lines below the primary.

Prepping for An Interview

 Prepping for An Interview

Conducting interviews is an essential part to a good gazette, you'll need the voices of the public to appeal to the public. Coming up with open-ended questions is your best bet, avoid the abundance of yes and no. We were taught in class how to make questions come off in the moment, and to ask our interviewee to spell out their name to avoid it being misspelled in the publication.

We were asked to make a list of 15 open-ended questions, I showed mine below.

How To Write A Caption (And Why They Matter)

 How To Write A Caption (And Why They Matter)

As short as they are, captions are still plenty time consuming to write. Captions are critical because more often than not they're the most read sentences in a piece of literature. Any good caption will include the five W's and their best H: the who, what, when, where, why, and how. These must all be written in past tense, and have a great action lead-in to attract your reader. If not that, a quote can also be an excellent way to improve their 

I showed my attempt at an expanded caption below.

Composition, Cropping, and Storage

 Composition, Cropping, and Storage

The composition, cropping, and storage are all so important when dealing with pictures. Composition is the visual structure of the picture, meaning that it can completely change how someone views a photograph depending on the composition. Secondly, cropping determines what is and isn't visible to the viewer eye. If you have extra sky in a picture that you don't need like in the picture below, crop it out. Lastly, storing your pictures in a both neatly organized manner plus making sure they can't be accidentally deleted is hard work. Even if you make the picture with the perfect cropping and stellar composition, it won't matter if it isn't stored properly and it's lost. These three things are just so important to how your pictures look.

The Importance of Photo Planning

 Planning My Pictures


In order to get the best shot for the best magazine, just like every other little thing, it requires planning. You need to know who you'll capture, where it'll be, what the focus is, the best angle, filters, everything. There's a list of things to capture, and make sure to check every box before going through with your shot.

Depths of Field and Photography Techniques

Depths of Field and Photography Techniques

Composing a beautiful gazette takes a lot of work, I've learned that lesson through all my time in my Media Studies class. I've discovered and been taught many techniques in my most recent months, focusing on the smaller things to make pictures come together and look good. Some of the best examples are depth of field, as it's my personal favorite to work with. Giving the picture a blurred foreground and background allows it to focus on what's right in the middle, I believe that it really gives a photo a 'feeling'.

While I love to talk about that specific techniques, others like rule of thirds, viewpoints, repetition and framing also make up great traits in pictures.