Duras Chateau

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French Journal Day 12 (Travel Diary Day 92)

 

(travel blog - strange-lands.com/daily/2012/10/14/duras-chateau/)

 

Rachel’s been tired today. She got up early yesterday to bring me breakfast in bed.

 

She went for a nap this afternnon, and when she returned she said “I feel so much better. It was so quiet.”

 

I said “Yeah, the dogs can be a bit tiring, can’t they?”

 

She replied with ‘Not the dogs, you!”

 

“Me?”

 

“Yeah”, she said, “the singing, dancing, squawking was all getting too much”.

 

Sometimes I get hyper, especially after drinking a sensual cup of coffee, or just any old coffee.

 

Today I was singing ‘I’m in the mood for dancing’. I have an amazing voice – my mother told me so. On this occasion I was squawking the song because it felt amazing to do it like that.

 

When I hit an energy peak, I start squawking. I didn’t used to. In the past I would have to run around, or do something physical, like pick Rachel up and throw her about. At first she thought it was funny. It soon got old.

 

I needed a different outlet for my energy. That’s when I came across the weird noises Ricky Gervais makes. When I started copying him it was such a relief.

 

I don’t know why people don’t use these noises all of the time.

 

Here is a video of Ricky doing the noises -

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWKi0QVlu_o&feature=player_em...

 

There were two main problems for Rachel today. Firstly, we’re so isolated no one can hear me squawk. I really go for it. It feels amazing. Secondly, I only know two lines to that song. I just repeated those two lines for an unknown period of time. I can see how that would be annoying.

 

This morning Bijou, being a husky, was on the steps howling like a wolf at the constant gunshots emanating from the surrounding forests. I sat down next to her and joined in. The more I howled, the more she howled. We bonded, I think, and it felt good to make that noise too.

 

Some people might think that I’m bi-polar. I’m not. I don’t really feel sad, I just get too much energy sometimes and it needs to go somewhere.

 

On another note, the car is a bit broken again. The brake calipers are seized on two of the wheels. I didn’t figure this out myself, of course.

 

I have to take it to the garage tomorrow where no one speaks English. That’ll be interesting.

 

Today’s Photo – Duras Chateau

 

When I’m the mood that I described above, editing photos is difficult. I can’t focus as well as I’d like to.

 

About 6 months ago I made a commitment to myself to start concentrating on pixels, and not just the image as a whole. I always enjoyed the saying, ‘Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves’. I think this is true to some degree in photography, but not entirely.

 

Since I made that commitment, as much as I have the chance, I sit and examine all areas of my photos at between 150%-200% in photoshop, in search of any fuzzy edges, HDR artefacts, CA, halos.

 

At first, it was a struggle sitting still for so long, but soon it became a form of meditation for me. I zone out. As I edit, I constantly zoom in and out of the image.

 

While a pixel-perfect image doesn’t make a great image, it certainly makes a cleanly edited one. That’s why it’s important to constantly check the image in its entirety in order to work on the balance of light and shadow, cropping etc. But sharpening, noise removal, and anything else, in my mind, is better done at pixel level.

 

This is another manually blended HDR. I wasn’t happy with the fuzzy pixels I was left with after processing in Photomatix. I still have NIK HDR Efex and Oloneo software to try. Maybe they’ll offer sharper image quality.

 

This is a château in the small village of Duras that Rachel and I had coffee in yesterday.

Done