A Vincent Mounier Photography Blog
If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be Prospect Park
Stopping momentarily to rest and feed on their southbound journey, hummingbirds pay us a yearly visit in later summer and early fall. The return journey in spring somehow is more discreet.
They might go as far as the Gulf of Mexico, which they will cross without food in what I can only compare to humankind going to the moon, their tiny heart beating twelve hundred times a minute.
They are adorable, barely bigger than a cicada, and impressively difficult to photograph...
No Comments
Retour aux Sources - Part 6, Antibes
August 24, 2024
Our house, at the summit of our street, our house... - Antibes, present day
About Antibes, there is so much to conjure I hardly know where to start. My first memories in life solid enough to be grounded in a location are set there. Our parents rented a small two-bedroom apartment in the outskirts, tucked on the side of a modern-looking villa which housed a total of three families at the top of a short and steep cul-de-sac called Allée des rosiers. We had a garden running ...
The Other Side of Reality - Aquatic Snow
July 10, 2024
While I am working on finishing the latest installment of Retour aux sources, our recent trip to France, I am playing with infrared photography. Here is a rather mesmerizing shot of plants in a pond at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
Summer snow
In the Realm of Infrared
July 4, 2024
Reality is so subjective. The visual universe we have painstakingly theorized, observed and transcribed throughout a few millennia of evolution (sic) is only real to our very biased human eye-brain combo.
Many so-called realities logically co-exist, then, likely as many as there are sentient beings, each group having its own adaptation. Honeybees see into the ultraviolet band. Our feline and canine friends only have limited color vision, their reality already departing ...
Retour aux Sources - Part 5, L’arrière-pays
May 15, 2024
Having packed up and bid farewell to Soja, the blue-eyed dog who had become our friend, we left Saint-Maximin and set out on a northerly drive that would not turn out as expected. Weather was marginal and when we reached the beautiful Lac de Sainte-Croix through which flows the Verdon river, gusts were so strong that simply standing outside on a beach to take a picture felt like a circus act. Strengthened by a venturi effect through the famous Gorges du Verdon, a fifteen-m...
Retour aux Sources - Part 4, Sainte-Victoire
April 19, 2024
Enjoying lasting clear skies courtesy of the mistral, we used our following morning to raid an open air market in the old Aix. There, charmed by the authentically friendly vibe and blinded by our willing tourist blinkers, we collected a fantastic saucisson for the road, a Tunisian zlabia—extremely sweet honey-based pastry which I devoured on the spot—and a couple of slices of pâte de fruit, traditional fruit paste with esoteric flavors of tomato, basil and herbs of Provenc...
Blossoming Sun
April 10, 2024
While I am working on the next Retour aux Sources installment, here is a quick artistic view of Monday’s solar eclipse. The individual images were shot with a small self-tracking telescope set up on the roof. This universe has a sense of humor—and proportions. What were the odds of a moon, four hundred times closer to us than the sun is, sneakily choosing to match our star’s apparent size when seen from Earth?
Blossoming Sun
Retour aux Sources - Part 3, Calanques
April 6, 2024
There are few places in the world that can compete in my heart with the sheer beauty of the Calanques. A jewel of the South of France, the Calanques de Marseilles are a coastal massif extending from the second-largest French city towards the east for some twenty kilometers as the crow flies. Carved out of limestone, they are a typically Mediterranean type of long rocky coves forming a series of steep and narrow inlets, making for an intricately chiseled shoreline.
White...
Retour aux Sources - Part 2, Arrival
March 28, 2024
The Big Apple was left behind on a Monday evening red-eye. Our hearts were heavy because Nkwe Pirelli, black kitty with white murder mittens, had not stayed behind before and our caring tendrils would stretch thin across the ocean. We flew into the night and landed in a rainy Paris the following dawn. Our first priority after reaching our departure terminal was to acquire coffee, croissants and a flan, which were ludicrously delicious as expected, even at an airport.
Ou...
Retour aux Sources - Part 1, A Bird's-eye View
March 18, 2024
When Marie offered me a Côte d’Azur birthday pilgrimage recently, I gasped and shivered with absolute delight. It was the best present ever. But without missing a beat, the raspy little voice of reason whispered in my ear: "Oh? And how are you going to make this happen without sabotaging 'work'?"
You see, work, with its inglorious cliché of putting bread on the table and a roof above our heads, had been steadily creeping from the intended status of a means to an end to ...
Blue Sparks
Visiting Jones Beach today for a sandy weekend run despite the high tide, I saw the usual shore birds including oyster catchers, but it was a flock of tree swallows that won my heart. Luckily I had brought the long lens and as soon as I was back from running, I set back out to pay the lovely blue birds a visit.
Tree swallows
Tree swallows
A Matter of Scale
September 11, 2022
On an outing to Montauk yesterday I was treated with whales, spinner dolphins in the distance and a few seals poking their head through the rolling surf, which had attracted many boards. The scale of that humpback (at least I think that's a humpback) is mind-boggling when you compare it to the fish desperately attempting to escape the scoop.
Humpback whale
And this morning, as I sipped my coffee, a minuscule ruby-throated hummingbird paid the terrace flowers a long vis...