Amy

Welcome back to my blog! This time around I decided to do something related to my future career, so I decided to learn some nursing skills and gain some medical terminology. Some of the skills I will be learning will include simple patient care, giving injections, starting an IV, and possibly delivering a baby. This will be done by using the medical simulations at Miles Community College. I will be learning the medical terminology by using books from the college and online resources. I will also be sitting in some of the college classes, so I hope to be able to learn more by being there. My Shark Tank Pitch was kind of frustrating for me, because I was in a car headed back home from Denver and I had to make a slideshow on my phone. It wasn't too bad until I realized that the service in Wyoming was a little off and on for about two hours. Finally I was able to have enough service to finish my slideshow, I just couldn't add any pictures. When I got home that night I added ...

I have good news! My video is roughly put together! While I still have some editing to do, I have the video pretty much put together. It is around five minutes long right now and for how long I have worked on this video, it seems somewhat short. However, when I sit back and think about it, I have learned how to take better pictures, edit the pictures, how to put a video together, and I did some research on the history. I have really learned a lot, and I can only hope my video will exemplify that. I still have some credits to put on the end of my video, so hopefully that will lengthen it a little. I also hope I can find a little more information that I could possible add to my documentary as well. One big issue I had with my documentary was adding in my videos. For whatever reason, the app I am using does not work very well with my videos. Whenever they play in the video, they freeze up and don't play very smoothly. For this reason, I only added two videos, because I didn't ...

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...

First of all, I want to tell you all how thankful I am that we had a four day weekend!  Thanks to this amazing, long weekend I was finally able to go out and take more pictures and videos.  I spent a couple of days getting the shots that I wanted, and I think they turned out pretty great! Since the weather was beautiful, I was able to take some nice landscape pictures and videos. One thing I learned this week, was that the sun makes a big difference when you take a picture.  If you look at an object with a camera with the sun behind it, the object will appear very dark and unrecognizable.  I was able to take pictures at different angles and avoid this problem, but if need be, I can take the pictures at a different time of the day. Moving objects are also hard to capture.  We moved cows this weekend, so I brought along my camera and tried to take some pictures of our cows and calves.  I had some luck, but I wish I was able to take some better pictures ...

This week I was able to start the process of taking pictures and videos for my documentary. I went out with my dad to check some cows so I took some pictures along the way. It was freezing cold and raining, and after about an hour of taking pictures my hands were frozen. Despite the awful weather, I was still able to take some great photos and a few videos. While I am not a photographer by any means, I was able to capture some great landscape pictures and some pictures of old buildings on the ranch. I was able to see how much I improved within the couple hours I took pictures and learned more about how to use the camera. However, with it being as cold and rainy as it was, I could not get some of the landscape pictures I wanted, and plan to take more on a clearer day, hopefully one where the sun shines a little bit more.  One thing I have learned this week, however, is that taking videos that look good is very hard to do. I took about three videos, mostly of landscape, and ...