A Vincent Mounier Photography Blog

Morning came, and went
February 20, 2008
Up at 4:30 am, I left home a little before 6:00 this morning, wearing a suit and trench coat (argh!), a briefcase at arm's length (argh again) and my thoughts distant and sweet. A thick winter fog bank blanketed the desert dark streets and muffled the sound of my hurried footsteps. My first stop, ritualistic and yet meaningless, was the coffee shop. Coffee, I had had already, and a very good one; an Italian espresso blend brought all the way back from South Africa and br...
Back from Cape Town
February 14, 2008
23:30 - Gate A3, OR Tambo International Airport, JohannesburgAir France flight 997 is finishing boarding. The massive Boeing triple seven, first aircraft ever released with an initial ETOPS-180 rating*, is just about empty. I’ve once again scored an exit row seat with a full 2 meter legroom and 2 empty seats next to me. And I’m almost sure that the crying baby who just threw up on the mother in the center row will now be quiet for a few hours.Almost a moth ago, I was flyi...
Trail Running in the Southern Hemisphere
January 26, 2008
It's called Table Mountain. It thrones over Cape Town like a king over his kingdom, or a queen over her lovers - high above, beautiful, strong, untouchable, feared and adored at the same time, killing remorselessly now and then, an icon. The city of Cape Town has sprawled all around the mountain and nowhere in town can one ignore the presence of the imposing plateau. Many more pictures of it will follow, but today was trail running day and the Viljoen family happens to ...
Sahara 2
January 26, 2008
After sitting on the tarmac for almost an hour and a half, waiting for a difficult refueling operation to complete and then waiting some more in line for departure on the only available runway at Paris CDG, we finally took off and headed south on our 10 hour journey to Johannesburg. It's now early afternoon. Air France flight 994, a mighty Boeing 777, is over-flying a most extraordinary landscape. 29,000 feet below us, stretched to infinity like the rippled and sunburne...
Airborne
Late at night somewhere over the Hudson Bay aboard Air France flight 045, an Airbus A-330 à destination de Paris. We're cruising at flight level 370 on our northeastern course. The outside air temperature is a chilly -60°C. To the south, the cold stars of Orion are perfectly framed into my starboard window. We will overfly the southern tip of Greenland in a few hours, on a great circle route between the two continents. I've stretched my legs comfortably and reclined my ...
Off to Africa
January 15, 2008
Tuesday 5:00 am. Je pars. ETA at destination, Thursday 9:00 am. Is the world really still such a big place? The short night was agitated and restless. I spent most of it in and out of a dream where a grinning, toothless taxi driver came to pick me up at home and drove me a quarter of a block away to the beach where an old cable-driven river ferry would take me across the ocean. I kept making it as far as the sand with my huge 7 bags and there, an unsympathetic flight atten...
Good old geeky IRC
January 13, 2008
You had to be there. It was a long time ago. Long before AIM, and Gmail chat, and MSN Messenger, and Skype, and ICQ, and Trillian and the like, the ancestor of online chatting was – and still is – called IRC. It stands for Internet Chat Relay. I spent hours on it, in chat rooms called channels, using the ever-popular mIRC and ViRC programs, writing scripts, customizing my messages, implementing colors, offering roses, seeking privileges, learning the syntax and the codes...
Le vent dans la voile
It’s a pretty big bag, I said to myself. It’s a heck of a big bag. I sat comfortably in my leather chair, coffee at hand, mentally gaging the size of my luggage and imagining logging it all halfway across the globe. A suitcase, conventionally sized, and a B.A.G., as in Bloody Awfully Gargantuan. That, mind you, was no ordinary bag. It contained, neatly folded and already asleep for way too long, my wings. And there as always lay the rub. Wings are not small. They grant ...
Flan pâtissier - 1er essai
January 5, 2008
On January 16th, 2008 around 8:30 am, I will be landing at Paris Charles de Gaulles. It will have been five years since my feet last trod on French soil. On January 16th, 2008 around 10:00 am, I will be taking off from Charles de Gaulle. It will have been five years and two hours since I actually got out of the airport and into Paris. Sigh. So near and yet so far. My steak tartare on a bank of the Seine river will have to wait... At least I'll be leaving France behind ...
FFDD6 Released!
January 4, 2008
[UPDATE: Sadly, Tim has stopped developing his script. I keep a copy and still use it, but I have removed the links below which had become obsolete.] Timothy Farrar has finally released the newest version of his fantastic digital darkroom tool, FFDD6. Of course I'm way too busy these days to afford the time necessary to process HDR photos, but it's exciting news and I can't wait to test run the script on the upcoming South Africa shots! Timothy and Kathryn are also p...
2008 on final approach
December 31, 2007
The New Year is upon us. It comes in from the East like a tsunami, rushing in, charging in at 463 m/s, faster than the speed of sound. If people were to shout Happy New Year to each other around the globe, they would still be late celebrating in the last time zone.I don’t know about where it’ll begin. All I know is that 10 hours before my midnight on the 31st of December, it will be New Year’s Eve in Cape Town. A countdown, hours turning into minutes, then minutes into s...