Amy

This was a great week of research for me! I have been reading the books I have and really enjoying them. One book, called Before Barbed Wire is a great informational book that tells many stories and relates them to others, telling the general history along the way. It is my favorite because it belonged to my Grandpa Haughian, and it includes many great photos from the earlier years of Montana. Another book I have, The Frontier Years, tells a more general history of Montana, but it includes quite a bit about the ranching history as well. The third book I am reading includes an overview of Montana ranching and many stories about the ranches who have been around for a century. This book, The Weak Ones Turned Back, The Cowards Never Started, was written in commemoration of the 125th Anniversary of the Montana Stockgrowers Association. I have been learning a lot about how the homesteaders lived, and I couldn't imagine living a life like theirs! The houses were very small and had many ...

I am currently in the Procrastinators Lounge at the MSU Bozeman campus, trying to write my blog before I compete later today. It has been pretty hard to keep up with my Genius Hour being gone all the time for FFA, but I have been trying to keep up. I hope next week with the long weekend I will complete much more. This week I have been doing more research on the history, and I have to admit, it is a harder topic to research than I thought it would be. I thought at first that it would be a broad enough topic to find information, but I soon realized I would have to do a little digging. I found a few websites with good information, but I hope I can find more. I have also found a few books at my house, but for the most part they are just stories about certain families and ranches. Still, I believe I can find some great information in them and use it in my documentary. I have most of my pictures and videos edited, and I must say, that have been very fun! I hope that I have enough pi...

I have to admit something, I did not accomplish very much this week. I was in Indianapolis until Saturday and when I returned home I had so much homework I couldn't even function! I did not take any pictures, but I did work on editing them and some of my research. Hopefully this next week will be a little more productive. One of my favorite things about this project is looking through and editing pictures. I enjoy learning about the many artistic ways you can enhance a photo. On most of my photos I enhance the brightness because it makes the landscape look fresher and adds more color to the ugly yellow grass of the fall. I also like to adjust the sharpness on photos of buildings. This adds more details, and makes edges look sharper.  Finally, with my videos I learned how to slow them down and cut them down so I only have the best parts of the video.  I sat down and looked up some great websites on Montana ranching that I plan to use. Along with the websites, I have a...