October 21-27

What I Did This Week

            I continued to work on some of the calendar pages, such as the month of December (which will be focused on energy, mostly light energy, conservation).

I also changed the background of the February calendar page because I realized it looked quite boring. Now it looks a bit childish so I may change the background again later.

Difficulties I Faced

            I sent my laptop in for servicing a few weeks ago since it had a virus. I got it back about a week ago and found that they deleted all my files and reinstalled the operating system: Windows. Fortunately, I had backed up most of my files so I did not lose much. Except my photos, which were all gone and I am very sad about. Anyway, the Windows operating system that the people at the shop reinstalled turned out to be a fake. Microsoft informed me of this after a few days of my having my laptop back. I did not know what Microsoft would do to my laptop if I kept on using the fake operating system; maybe shut it down, forever.

How I Solved the Challenges/What I Learned

            I solved this challenge by backing up my files and pictures, taking my laptop back to the store, and telling them to reinstall the genuine Windows operating system that I had before all this happened so that I could get back to living my life without any more problems. So they did, and reinstalled some of my programs as well, like Skype, Google Chrome, VLC Media Player, iTunes, and others. Then I had to go to the other store where I bought Adobe Photoshop and InDesign and ask the people there to reinstall the two programs. Now I have it, a genuine version of Windows (I hope), and all my files on Dropbox instead of in the internal storage of my laptop. I am not letting this happen again. What I learned from this experience is that not everything one downloads from the Internet is beneficial to one’s laptop (the virus that started this whole thing was part of a download link). I already had been told that by many people, but it never really stuck in my head. Now that I have had this experience, I can safely say that it is stuck in my head. I have also learned to constantly back up my pictures in a safe place. I lost all of them, and only have the ones that I put on Facebook. Those are not even very good quality, but it is all I have. Hopefully things will look up in the near future and this will not happen again.

October 14-20

Organizational Skills

            Fall break is here! Now I have a lot more time to work on my Personal Project and get some other work done. To start off, I looked at the calendar dates (2014 to 2015) that I found last week.

http://annystudio.com/calendars/2014/2014-calendar-row-mo-portrt.gif

http://annystudio.com/calendars/

            I also found a list of Indonesian public holidays for both the end of 2014 and all of 2015, which I can use as a reference for my calendar’s red days.

http://publicholiday.org/calendar/indonesia-public-holidays-2014-calendar/

http://www.printablehub.com/indonesia-2015-printable-holiday-calendar/

Communication

            I asked the woman at the program store if she knew how to use Indesign, and she told me that she did. In addition, she was going to show me a few of the tools and how they worked, but when she opened the program I realized that it was just like Photoshop with a few tools added. I did not want to waste anymore of her time since she had other customers waiting, so I told her I would just look up some web tutorials to figure out how to use the tools that were not in Photoshop.

Information Literacy

To make my first calendar page, I used a tutorial on Youtube by “btscreativesuite”.

It helped greatly because I learned a lot about making tables in Indesign, coloring them, and resizing the different columns and rows. The color scheme I am planning to use for each calendar page will be according to the color scheme of its corresponding picture. Like the issue of Wolf Conservation:

            Since the wolves in the picture are grey, I decided to make the rows of dates grey. Also, the background is mostly green, so the title row is colored green. I decided that if they were switched (the title being grey and the dates being green, the green may be too dark for anybody to write their important events on, rendering it useless). I also drew some calendar designs. I had created some before, in the beginning of the school year, but I realized that the main focus of the picture page of the calendar should be the picture itself, not the short paragraph and tip. So I made the space allotted for the picture bigger, and the text space smaller.

This is the first rough draft of the design of my calendar.

This is the second draft. It puts a lot more emphasis on the picture, which people will probably pay more attention to anyway.

October 7-13

Organizational Skills

            I realized that Wednesday, the 9^th of October, is the last day before our fall break. This, I am very happy about because I can finally relax somewhat. I plan to use most of the time to work on creating my Personal Project product, the calendar, and getting some other projects done. I also found some pictures of 2014 and 2015 calendars so I will know which date goes on which day of the week (I searched for both 2014 and 2015 calendars because I decided I would make my calendar months different than usual: instead of January to December, I will use July 2014 to June 2015.

Communication

            I communicated with my mom about how to balance my social life and my studies during this coming week-long break. She told me to prioritize the studies over the social life, but not completely block out my friends. So I went out to a waterpark with my friends on the first day of the holiday (Thursday), and focused on my homework and Personal Project the rest of the time.

Information Literacy

            I changed from trying to do January to December 2014 to July 2014 to June 2015. This is because I realized that if I did the whole year of 2014, by the time I was finished presenting it and giving it to people, half of the year would already be gone. This would mean that my calendar would only be good for half a year and not a full year as I planned. I also flipped through a book about photography, called Click: The Ultimate Photography Guide for Generation Now. The authors are Charlie Styr and Maria Wakem.

As I was looking at the photographs in the Nature section, I read that using a wide angle is the best thing for shooting landscapes. In addition, Aperture Priority Mode should be used when taking photographs outdoors.

This way, the camera chooses the optimal shutter speed for a certain setting while the person chooses the aperture so that the picture will not be too bright or too dark. I also learned that silhouettes of subject matter instead of brighter, colored subject matter looks good in sunset scenes. Lens flares as well.

I learned not to be afraid to use monochrome coloring for photos; it actually makes them look really good. Also, fog in a picture gives an eerie feeling to viewers, as shown.

            I should not use monochrome in excess, however, because most of the time colors are what bring out the character in the subject matter. I noticed that a lot of the pictures in the book use the rule of thirds. So I decided to try.

            All the above pictures are my own, just in case any readers were wondering; except for the monochrome one of me (my friend took that one).