Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Dream Big Project Introduction

     Over the past few months I have been learning photography for my Honors Humanities Dream Big Project. We were given 20 hours to learn something we wanted to, and be able to show what we learned and how we progressed over those hours. For my Dream Big Project first semester, I learned how to play the ukulele. I had a lot of fun doing that project, but I haven't picked up my ukulele in months. For this project, I wanted to pick something that I thought I could continue with after the project is done.
     I chose photography because its always been something that has interested me. I always see cool pictures on social media and think, "Man, I wish I could do that." So, when I was given an opportunity to learn how to, I took it. Another reason I chose photography, is because of my love for sports. I know that I really love when parents on my team take pictures and share them with us, and I figured now I could give back. At first I thought about printing out the pictures and selling them, but I decided against that idea. It would cost a lot to buy the special paper and the ink, especially on top of the camera itself, plus I don't think very many people would buy them.
     Going into this project, I knew showing my improvement and what I learned would be difficult. After all, most of it came from research, and then trial and error. So, in my video, I showed my starting point, where the pictures were really dark. Then, I showed some that were decent pictures, but they definitely weren't great. Lastly, I had a slideshow of my favorite pictures from the entire project. I'm not sure how well this will show my progression, but I'm hoping my blog can make up for it. 
     Overall, I really like the learning part of the project, but not the video part. I enjoyed learning a skill that I will have for the rest of my life, and I'm hoping I will still keep up with taking some action shots and cool photos. The only things I disliked about the project were blogging, because it became extremely annoying, and putting together my video, because I was stupid and had major problems. I won't go into depth because you can read my last post about the problems I ran into, but it was just a pain in the butt. After doing two projects like this, I would recommend everyone go out and learn something new that they've always wanted to learn. 

Day 16: Major Video Struggles

     To present my project, I decided to make a video showing what I did and some of the pictures I took. I was having a really tough time with the audio, but I finally got it. Overall, I spent nearly 10 hours over a week putting the video together and editing it. I finally finished it last night at about 8:00. It was a bit longer than I wanted it to be, but I was really happy with how it turned out. I was so proud of it, I decided to show my whole family before I put it on YouTube. They all liked it a lot too. After showing it to my family, I tried to upload it from my iPad. I had edited the video on iMovie on my iPad. I got a message that said I didn't have enough storage to upload it. So I thought, "Okay, no problem. I'll just delete some of the videos off of my camera roll." That is probably the worst decision I have ever made in my entire life. After deleting the videos off of my camera roll, I went back to iMovie to try and upload it again. This time I got a message saying some of the videos were missing, so I couldn't upload it. Panicking, I went to see if they were in my recently deleted, but they weren't because I didn't have enough storage for the videos to go there. I have never been more mad at myself in my entire life.
     After spending 3 hours and 300 dollars on recovery software that didn't even work, my dad emailed my teacher. I was a little pissed off that my dad emailed my teacher without asking me, because it probably should have been me that emailed him. Luckily, my teacher was very understanding and is now giving me until the end of spring break to get the video uploaded.