Hi Josh

Your posting gets stronger as you go along as you start to describe your thinking and be more reflective about your work. Please try to keep up to date.

Week 3

This lesson, we started off by focusing on our blogs and research reports, to make sure we were keeping up to date with our home learning. We put all our completed work into our folders, then the teacher called us one by one to speak with us about how are research reports and blogs were going so far, and also checking and commenting on what we had in our folders.

We were then told about the Orange Tree Cafe, That our current project is based on. I wrote down a brief of what I should consider to take notes on or any useful information I should try to find out based on the cafe itself. Information such as: the menu, the address and phone number, the history, the employees, any special offers or meals of the day etc.

As a class we all went to visit the cafe, so that we could get a better look and understanding of the cafe with our own eyes. I examined the full style of the furniture and layout of the cafe and wrote down my opinions and first impressions of the inside of the cafe. Then I did the same for the menu and quickly wrote down all important facts that i would need for the future. Then we headed back to school, and in groups discussed how we were going to create an advert to promote the cafe and what sort of advert were we going to do. I suggested maybe a video for the website or to create a webpage ourselves, we continued to discuss and eventually just decided flyers would be the best option for  advertising the cafe.

Week 2

This lesson, we started off by getting into pairs and analyzing pictures of food on the internet and writing notes about what them such good pictures. Then we ventured off outside of the classroom, taking pictures of small objects where ever we could find them, using all sorts of angles and close ups, this was a great practical for taking pictures of objects, as we got to explore photography on objects all by ourselves which was fun.

Once we had practiced taking pictures of small objects in our pairs, we then took our own pictures of food that the teacher had provided for us. We used come white cardboard to help angle the light, making it more suitable for taking pictures of the food. We also tried to move the liquids about a bit to give a more ripple effect on the surface of the drinks, because it looked better than just stilled calm water, and we tried cutting some pieces of food slightly showing some of the insides of the food, which we believed also gave a greater effect to the photos.

After our practical work had been completed and posted onto google docs, we began to continue our work on our advertisement campaign research reports and working on our blogs. I think the days activities were very practical and fun for most of the class, it was a great way to explore food photography by ourselves instead of loads of listening to the teacher for once we were able to research the topic in pairs without any assistance.

Advertisement campaigns

This lesson, we rotated from media with Mr.Durran at Coleridge, to now doing photography with Mr.Hiend at Parkside. We began the lesson by looking at advertisements and  how they are presented to people. Adverts are usually shown on things that many people use daily such as: Television, the Internet, the radio, public buses, newspapers, posters etc. The purpose of advertisement is to raise awareness for something, mostly company's will use adverts. They use advertisements to try and sell their products to the public, things like food, sweets, movies, TV shows, toys, cars, perfume, shops etc. All have advertisements produced by the company's that manufacture those products.

After break, we looked at advertisement campaigns and began to study them. Using the Internet I looked for examples of advertisement campaign videos and found a quite a few, quite a lot were based upon global warming and healthy foods and top brands. I then made a table of three of the advertisement campaigns I had analysed, and wrote about them and their purpose.

In the afternoon, we got into groups of three, and using those groups we had to discuss how we would advertise a bag that Mr.Hiend had given us to advertise. I analysed the contents within the bag and the actual bag itself, noting down all the names of the items and compartments of the bag, to help give a more detailed description so that we could tell the buyer what they were actually buying. I then took a picture of all the items and compartments, then uploaded the photos. Using the notes i had made on the product, i labeled each photo to make sure people knew what they were looking at. Then i gave my notes to the other members of the group for them to price and use for the presentation.