A Vincent Mounier Photography Blog

The Quest for Meeleon
September 15, 2016
It's a long love story. Back in 2008, upon my first visit to South Africa and after hearing from various Cape Town informants that elusive chameleons were possibly to be found nearby, I set out on a quest to seek out new life and new reptile civilization, to boldly go find what I had never found before. Unknown to me, I had begun the unlikely search for Meeleon. After much staring at bushes under the quizzical looks of dog-walkers who could not understand why I seemingl...
Planning an Escape from New York City
August 11, 2016
Soon to be joining Marie down in beautiful Cape Town, I was having coffee high above Midtown this morning, the hot air thick with moisture and haze beginning to smear a jagged skyline, and I pondered the insanity of our modern lifestyle. Can a human being really work fifty weeks a year, barely threading water in a giant pool called society and filled with stress and pressure, the fluid akin to dirty engine oil, sticky, restrictive and toxic, and then wipe the slate clean a...
New York City Safari
August 1, 2016
With a trip to South Africa finally approaching, my year-long, city-must, day-to-day rat-race-controlling concentration is breaking up and I catch myself thinking about road trips and the many marvelous animals we see there. The fact that in North America we get two weeks' vacation time out of the fifty-two our planet grants us while chasing its tail around the sun, still both puzzles and depresses me. But that's another story. I am here to remind myself, by showing you...
Fireflies!
June 26, 2016
At first there was one, we tracked it all night, pointing fingers like children in a zoo. Then there were two. A night later, three. Now there are so many we lose count. It's not the woods, of course, but for a New York City neighborhood, it's quite pleasant. They fly around us and light up our evenings. With birds of all kinds, the bloody squirrels, visiting cats, a dog across a fence, the raccoon and even possums, this is a lively garden space. I'll soon post about ou...
Philly
A few months ago, while a moody winter hiccuped erratically across the Eastern Seaboard, I blew the proverbial fuse and blasted off our Brooklyn island and unto uncharted territory at the wheel of a Zipcar. Poor Marie was tied up to her computer by aggressively lively deadlines, and I just had to see the world. Any world. Fast. Willingly lured by the artistically carved, delicately etched and forever lacquered and polished memories of my dear tropics, I was weak and wen...
Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn - 360 Panorama
May 4, 2016
// I am posting this for the heck of it, despite many imperfections. Water movement caused the boats to blur, people were strolling past, birds flew like UFO's and clouds struggled to all say cheese at the same time. Oh well, I needed the practice and this is the result of eighty separate exposures, combined into a single image through exposure fusion, my new HDR replacement, and PTGui Pro, and some Photoshop tweaking of the nadir and zenith. Consider this a rehears...
Walking Down the Memory Lane
Yesterday on the web I unexpectedly came upon the soundtrack of the old French movie Le Rapace. I downloaded the file, gave it a quick antivirus check – even though only a French user could have made this track available and everybody knows that French viruses spread on an honor basis only – and opened it with Winamp. Thunder. Lightning. Stars exploding in giant supernovae. The darkest of black holes suddenly opened around me and I fell in, helpless, as if a distant ele...
Feather Count
April 22, 2016
A couple of months ago, walking home from the subway with a hook towards Whole Foods, we came upon a gathering of people who stood on sidewalks, pointing up animatedly and aiming phones. At first I had thought they were looking at a plane but the object of their attention turned out to be a pair of large red-tailed hawks. The birds appeared to be collecting little sticks from the top branches of a tree to build their nest, which they puzzlingly had elected to place on t...
The Namaqualand Bloom, Part 5 - Luxing Out at Babylonstoren
Having disdainfully discarded the main artery option and instead opting for a rougher drive south on yet another isolated dirt road, we sliced our way through beautifully empty Karoo-like scenery, stacked landscape layers fading to the horizon like memories in a tired mind, losing sharpness as they grew distant. Karoo In Clanwilliam, we rejoined the busy N7 exactly at the point where major roadwork had impressed us on the way up. It did again. Of massive proportions, t...
Truffle!
February 24, 2016
This was Marie's outrageously delicious gift recently, once-in-a-lifetime splurge - or maybe more, who knows, hard to resist once you know the way. We accommodated our truffle six or seven different ways, my favorite being a very simple pasta dish which reminded me of a fun dinner at Manhattan's A Voce years ago when Marie's mother had been visiting and full MINO* was in effect. There is something viscerally raw and gripping to walking into an apartment that smells of t...