Equipment Advantages and Disadvantages Table

What equipment have you used over the past year?	Advantages	Disadvantages	What did I create with it? What features did I use?
(Hardware)  Cannon E350D Camera	Has automatic and manual modes so you can control aperture/shutter speed/focus/ISO settings. It’s very versatile and has a 38mm to 55mm zoom lens; there are also 8 mega pixels available. It’s also got an automatic white balance facility, which compensates for processing problems and redhead lighting colour from the flash kit.	It’s a very expensive piece of kit, and is rather bulky. Therefore it’s quite risky to take on location shoots. It only has a maximum of 8 mega pixels, and professionals would use a minimum of 12.	I created different aperture settings, used manual and auto focus, changed the shutter speed to create light-path pictures and still image shots etc. I used the different aperture/ISO/shutter speed/focus settings.
(Hardware) Silk Tripod	Avoids camera shake, really stable so that it can be used on different surfaces, it’s fairly light so that it’s easily portable and it also has a tilting pivot where the camera goes so that you can create angled shots.	Quite fragile so you can easily break it, they’re really expensive and if you don’t set it up correctly then shots may not be level and could blur.	I created my aperture photos with it to reduce camera shake, and I used the tilting action.
(Hardware) Lastolite paper backdrops	Disposable so you can get a really good background for your photos, and you can get them in a range of colours. (Easy to change around.)	Expensive because you have to replace them when the paper is run out (cut torn or dirty sections away), they rip and get mucky and are very large and heavy.	Used to shoot models on for final product.
(Hardware) External Flash and Flash Kit ·         800 watt Arrilite redheadsx2 ·         continuous lighting Bowens softbox and flash lighting equipment	·         Doesn’t need to be metered, they’re very durable and easy to set up. They are also fairly light so that they are easy to move around and they allow for spot and flood settings. ·         Stops pictures from getting a red/orange hue, they stop the models from getting to hot, and provides complete control over your light. Professionals would use this.	·         Give the photos a red/orange hue, they’re very hot for models to work under and industry professionals wouldn’t really use them. ·         You need to use a flash-meter, they can be difficult to set up because they are professional and can take a long time to set up. If you set them up wrong you could ruin you images.	·         Used the lights to illuminate my models and backdrop when shooting the images for my final product, and also controlled light ratios so that shadows/brightness could be achieved.
(Hardware) Apple Mac	Good for photo management, and are easy to use Photoshop and InDesign on. Really fast working with a large screen for easy editing.	Sometimes trying to do basic things can be much more confusing than on a regular computer, and if you do something on a Mac then sometimes it won’t work on a regular computer- so you can only work on that Mac.	Used for my media work and Photo editing, e.g. Photoshop and InDesign.
(Software) Photoshop CS4	It’s industry standard and really good for use of different tools. You can use different layers so that your work is easily manageable and mistakes aren’t irreversible, you have total control over the manipulation of your images through brightness/ curves/effects/colour use/ contrast etc... You can also make transparent images on Photoshop which can then be overlaid onto other programs such as InDesign, or just layered with other photos on Photoshop.	It’s not good with dealing with large amounts of text, it is rather complicated for a beginner and the files can be really large sizes. There’s also quite a lot of problems with it not recognising downloaded texts, so each time I opened my front cover, I had to go back onto ‘DaFont’, download my text again and use it in Photoshop.	·         Effects- drop shadows ·         Layers- overlapping images and text, bringing forward some layers and sending back some others ·         Text- changing fonts, font size, outlines, colour etc... ·         Image adjustment features- brightness and contrast, cropping, lassoing, magnetic lassoing, transforming selections, shape creation, brushes etc... ·         Save options- saving in JPEG format so images could be uploaded to blog.
(Software) InDesign	Good at dealing with text, you can type on it just as well as typing on Word, it also has ‘text wrap’ and ‘drop caps’ functions which give your articles a more professional look. There are also guidelines that can be applied which are really helpful when creating your columns to write in and controlling the overall layout of the page, and the files are much smaller than Photoshop.	It’s professional so can be complicated for a beginner, but once you get used to it it’s okay to use. It’s not very good with handing images; there are limited capabilities for use of images. (But it is compatible with Photoshop so you can easily quickly edit an image on Photoshop and then place it into InDesign).	·         Controlling pages and text- making specific page sizes, applying margin guidelines, making column guides, importing text, inserting and resizing image and text boxes, fitting images to their boxes and moving them about the pages, applying drop shadows/glows of text and changing the direction/size/opacity/noise of drop shadows, and controlling text elements (font, colour, size, outline, opacity etc...) ·         Colour- using CMYK colour codes, appling drop shadows ·         Images- importing and placing images ·         Exporting projects- inserting a new page with front cover from final project on, exporting the file to a JPEG/PDF so that it could be uploaded to Moodle for marking, and storing in another format so I had various copies and knew it was safe.
(Software) Microsoft Word	Good at dealing with text, easy to use and compatible with most other programs.	Not overly good with images, but pretty decent.	Used everything for development of all coursework.
(Software) Brusheezy.com	Many different brushes that you can use and they’re free to download.	You can’t test them out before download, so you have to go through the effort of downloading them and then putting them onto Photoshop- and then if they’re not right you have to delete them and go find another.	Magazine mock-up front cover.
(Software) DaFont.com	Wide range of fonts that are free to download. Therefore you can easily find a suitable font for the theme of your work.	There’s so many that it can be quite time consuming to search through them all to find the right one.	Used for the masthead of my magazine mock-up and final product.
(Software) Blogger	Good for getting all of your work in one place and showing development.	There’s limited tools to use on the posting, and text/photos are difficult to manoeuvre. Photos are really awkward to set out and often overlay the text and don’t go where you want them to go. Also when you post the work, if you have copied and pasted a table from Microsoft word then the table sometimes goes over the white background of the post and runs over the background pattern- and you can’t make it smaller.	Show skills development, used all features; change fonts, font sizes, upload images, bold, italics, underline etc...