Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Monday, Oct. 16, 2006 - 1:03 p.m.

I have spent several hours now wading through images taken at Giverny. Hours as in 13. Thirteen hours. Looking at pictures of an entire day in which most of them were wasted because the sky was fucking white all day. I am not exaggerating when I tell you I want to cry. You can't really take good pictures of Claude Monet's beloved lily pond on a day with a white sky. Why? Because water reflects. Generally, water reflects sky. So even pictures where I managed to crop out most of the sky still have wide open expanses of blinding white light making the contrast impossible to fix. I dropped the exposure level in an effort to compensate, because everything white was really, really white, but then that made everything not white even more dingy and dark. So the whites are still unbefuckinglievably white, and the colors of everything else are drab and utterly lacking in contrast. This is a problem I don't have to battle quite so much with film, because film is a much more forgiving element than are 1's and 0's. On top of this, I am PMS'g and cramping like I can't tell you. My emotions are such that I am alternating between wanting to cry and fighting the urge to go over there to the sink, take out the nice, big, heavy hammer from the toolkit, and bash the everlovin' crap out of the laptop. As this is not good, I have stopped looking at images and am going to go to bed now.

Giverny was really cool, btw. The garden was still in full bloom. The house is small and you don't get to see all of it, but it's not the main attraction, anyway. The gardens, pond, and river are the deal. It was really odd being there, because I kept having major deja vu, and my brain kept trading images with what was right in front of me and the pictures in my mind's eye of the Waterlilies paintings at the l'Orangerie. Several times as I was walking around the pond, I realized I was standing pretty much right where Money had been standing for a certain part of a canvas. It was wild. I don't think one often gets to have that experience, so the next time you're in Paris, I can not recommend strongly enough going to the l'Orangerie to see the Waterlilies, and then going to Giverny to walk the pond. But do it in spring or summer, when the weather is nicer, because we froze to death, and I think I've expressed my views on crappy white sky.

After we spend several hours touring the house and gardens, we had lunch at the American art museum and then walked around the village of Giverny, which is very peaceful and picturesque. We finally headed home around 4:30 in the afternoon. I took pictures of the drive, which I will post when I get around to editing them. I've got a week's worth of images to sort through - 5-7 gigabytes worth. Trust me when I tell you, that's a lot of freaking images.

Firefly has finished it's run on SciFi Channel, and I am totally, totally sad. Damn you, Fox execs. May the chiggers of a thousand cow pastures infest your Aero chairs and bite you on your sensitive parts.

I'm so sleep-deprived, I don't even remember where I've been the last week. Or whether or not I blogged it, though I think I did. I'm seriously going to bed, now.

Peace out,
Katie

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Yesterday's News - Next Stop

In which Katie shares sad news - Wednesday, Apr. 01, 2015
In which Katie returns after a very long absence - Monday, Jun. 25, 2012
In which Katie pokes her head in and brushes some of the cobwebs away - Thursday, May. 06, 2010
In which Katie asks you to write your congressman again. - Monday, Jun. 02, 2008
In which Katie asks you to please click the link and send the message to protect the rights of artists - Wednesday, May. 21, 2008