A Vincent Mounier Photography Blog

Mordor Skies Over New York's East River
July 28, 2011
When leaving work last Tuesday night, I reversed my usual route and headed north and then across the East River on the 7 train. I was meeting Marie at the Gantry Plaza State Park in Queens for a picnic. While not as masterfully designed as our new favorite Brooklyn Bridge Park, Gantry is  nice and uses its rather limited space efficiently with the addition of a few jetties. There are ample wooden lounge chairs as I first saw then on the Highline, hammock-like swings mou...
Mordor Skies over New York - Coming Soon!
July 27, 2011
My apologies to those of you who might have stumbled upon a half-finished post bearing the above title without any pictures. It was the result of me innocently begining a draft from my WordPress phone app and posting it live by mistake rather than saving it as a draft... Fear not, I am too le tired tonight to finish processing the images, but they are worth the extra wait despite the fact that they were taken in low light, high ISO and high boat roll. Tomorrow night shou...
Italia in Brooklyn
July 24, 2011
A recent visit to Williamsburg's Giglio Festival left me unimpressed. Brooklyn's Atlantic Antic is much crazier when it comes to street fairs. But I was headed to Queens and needed to kill some time before sunset. One thing is for sure, there were characters. This guy wins many awards. He sold cigars. He smoked one. He was focused. He made me smile. He was more real than real. He was it. The reason I'd hoped off the subway and walked up and down two short blocks of noisy r...
Heat wave!
July 21, 2011
36°C today, 38°C tomorrow, and I'm not even considering humidity... To put things in perspective, the maximum African summer temperature Marie and I experienced in Keetmanshoop, Namibia, on our 2009 road trip, was 40°C. So what's wrong with this picture? African heat on North America's Eastern Seaboard. And we can't even claim to have the Big Five. But that's probably as well. I've seen New York drivers in the snow and they sure could not handle deep sand... Frid...
Happy Birthday Madiba!
Today is a good day, for multiple reasons. But South Africa, once again, is in dire need of inspired leadership. So much has been accomplished already and yet, all things remain in an inherent state of instability, like a tightrope walker hesitating between two masts, impressive and yet so fragile, half way there but only half way through. With no safety tether, right in the middle of a long crossing, where oscillation is maximum and a fall most likely, it is hope, m...
Gantry Plaza State Park, Queens - 360 Panorama
July 17, 2011
I had gotten so used to Lower Manhattan views from the Brooklyn Bridge Park that I had almost forgotten how much more impressive midtown's skyline is. Here are a couple of 360° panoramas taken from the Grantry Plaza State Park in Queens, a place which reminds me both of the Highline and the Brooklyn Bridge Park. It was a windy night, the wooden boardwalk was slightly woobly, and many people were walking by with the grace of elephants on a rampage. I had trouble keeping ...
How to Catch a Rat on a Small Island
R.I.P. dear Ann. This is a story from long, long ago, the way I remember it - may everyone forgive me if the years have polished it a bit... Ann lived in the green beach house next to the Southern Cross Club in Little Cayman. Her house-mate, I believe it was Wes, had been off island. He'd left his sweet dog Marilyn to guard the place. When he came back, there was blood on the outside walls. Alarmed, he asked Ann what had happened... It would seem that one night, A...
Strange Brooklyn Shores
July 11, 2011
Blessed with an exceptional 578 miles of shoreline - a good portion of which is in Brooklyn - New York City is a gigantic hydropolis. Lifeguard rescue boat on the 'People's Beach', Jacob Riis Park In the southeast, similar to the barrier islands that protect Long Island's eastern shore, a narrow sandy peninsula called the Rockaways extends down from Queens, flanked by the ocean on one side and the ideally protected sound of Jamaica Bay on the other. The bay is an odd, ...
When it Pours, it Rained
July 9, 2011
Friends are precious. Why do we wait until it's too late to tell our friends how much we love them? Why do we find ourselves with our back against a sadness wall, reflecting with other friends on how wonderful the missing one was, unable to change the fact that it's too late to say it or show it in person? We get complacent. We take it for granted. We become self-aware. Pride kicks in. It's hard to look someone in the eye and tell them how nice they are. It's makes us l...
R.I.P. Xavier
July 7, 2011
The paragliding community just lost a good man. Xavier Murillo, a well-known French paraglider and author, had been missing in the Andes after a July 1st flight. His body was found today high on the slopes of Huascarán. Xavier Murillo - Photo: James 'Kiwi' Johnson In such a time of sadness, it is comforting to witness so many strangers coming together to help find a missing comrade. Forums and Facebook pages we launched in real time to reach out to the paragliding w...
Exploring the Pennsylvania Woods
When possible, escaping the city for a few days is revitalizing, as in "vital". It restores perspective and calms nerves down. Having graciously been invited to do just that, we caught a bus at New York's Port Authority Terminal and rode west for two hours, crossing three state lines along the way. Leaving the city, our coach plunged into New Jersey, hooked north back into the State of New York, then drifted south again to Port Jervis where it crossed the Delaware River in...
Coming Soon: A Weekend in the Woods
July 4, 2011
Away from the city for the 4th of July weekend, we took to the Pennsylvania woods with friends, looked for mushrooms, tracked down an elusive orange salamander, swam in a motor-free lake and when the rain was done pouring, watched this stunning sunset. More pictures coming soon. Sunset on Twin Lakes, Shohola, PA