A Vincent Mounier Photography Blog
Epiphany of the true nature of cell phones
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Vancouver's Celebration of Light
A very small boy carrying a huge piece of driftwood creeps by in the darkness, the end of his load barely missing the tripod on which thrones Abe. She must shiver at the thought of all the wet sand surrounding us and that would gladly sneak into every open space of her delicate anatomy. I make a mental note to keep the kid in my peripheral vision.This has been a strange day, one of those "lost before they even started" battles. For many reasons not worth mentio...
Invisible Light of the Deepest Nights
July 26, 2007
It’s 2:30 am. All cats are gray and people are few. The streets are wet and shiny from hours of rain, but for the time being only a fine mist fills the air; it feels almost as being inside a cloud. Speaking of which, the clouds drawn on the horizon by city lights of different color temperatures are quite eerie. I decide to interrupt my walk on the Seawall and run back home to get the camera.
Here is what I record. No, these are not sunset or sunrise shots, nor are they da...
Cascades Revisited
July 23, 2007
They’re big, they’re high, they’re sharp and they reign over the local landscape like as many kings on their respective kingdoms. They are the volcanoes of the Cascades mountain range.
My last visit to the American part of the Pacific Northwest dated back almost two years. I had driven around Mt. Hood, observed Mt. St. Helens from a distance, glanced at Rainier from the highway and marveled at the fact that Baker was not only so close to the Canadian border, but to Vanc...
Of sunsets and mankind
July 15, 2007
There's a lot more to sunset than meets the eye. From immemorial times, mankind has watched sunsets with a twinge of the heart and a sigh, while sunrises were left alone and generally ignored. Why is that?As a race, we are dreamers, yet we do not know very well how to empower ourselves and make our dreams come true. We rely on hope and we pass our wishes on to faith. But when the time comes to act and think bold, we get caught up in the moment's difficulties and lose sig...
Google Maps revisited
July 7, 2007
I've said it before, we live in a wonderful age. Even if one can't afford to travel (that would be me these days), there still are amazing virtual options to explore the world, options that weren't available to us only a decade ago. Google Maps, for instance, continues to innovate and impress me. You can now, in select U.S. cities, get a street level photographic view of an address. That's right. Anywhere in town!
Let's say you've just booked a couple of nights at the Pe...
HDR 101 - The results
July 1, 2007
Here are the few HDR pictures I chose out of the 105 I took that night. Common theme, different light, as the sun went down through the clouds and disappeared behind the mountains. They were shot from Second Beach, on the western side of Stanley Park, facing English Bay and with Point Grey and Bowen Island in the background.
HDR 101 Or how to spend way too much time on a computer
June 30, 2007
[UPDATE: As of 2011, Tim Farrar has stopped developing his FFDD HDR script, possibly because of the appearance of so many good user-friendly HDR programs. I still have a copy of the script and use it regularly but I have removed the links below that no longer resolved.]
By popular request, and also to a lesser extent because I'll enjoy doing it and might even benefit from it myself, I've finally decided to write my own modest HDR tutorial. In order to do so, I must make...
Still playing with exposure blending and HDR
June 24, 2007
Experimenting with a new beta FFDD script kindly provided for testing by Timothy Farrar, I must say that I am having a whole lot of fun with photography and HDR, and have come to the following uncorrelated conclusions:The level of noise reduction achieved by blending multiple bracketed exposures into a final HDR digital negative is amazing;I need a better lens or two. The generic zoom lens that came with the Canon XTi is just not good enough, too soft and cheap, as any b...
Trail running the Middle Earth
June 20, 2007
If my legs accept to carry me across the grass and into the street, I’m going to buy myself an ice cream. I’m dripping in a mixture of sweat and water from sticking my head under the park’s public shower, but I’m sure they’ve seen it all before and I want that ice cream. I’ve wanted it since the second bridge, when the thought of the freezing water below crept into my mind. Of course I was on a schedule and only took time to snap a picture of the canyon, and my fingers at ...