A Vincent Mounier Photography Blog

Retour aux Sources - Part 1, A Bird's-eye View
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
April 22, 2023
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...
The AI's of My Dreams
The world of all things creative, whether photography, painting, digital art, product design, cartoons, etc. is about to be blown to pieces by a tornado of unprecedented proportions: the emergence of AI. For the record, I created all the images in this post with the help of one of the AI's mentioned below*. I then enlarged them because the current output sizes are low, but no other editing was applied. Those tools have been trained to compare the relationship between te...
The Butterflies
August 17, 2022
On a recent Long Island outing, we found lovely pollinators that managed to momentarily dull a mindful of existential puzzles and quiet down those chaotically newsworthy echoes that clash with one's inner peace on a daily basis. You know what I'm talking about, the news, COVID, a war, children in suits playing with their Mar-a-Lego... Black swallowtail, Long Island The chaos theory uses a butterfly analogy to illustrate how small changes in initial conditions can great...
Close Encounters of the Small Kind
August 13, 2022
After stating in a recent post that "nobody likes bugs", I decided to prove myself wrong, go back to the source and look at the little devils with a new eye. Or rather an old lens. Unidentified clown-ish beetle The best thing about macro photography is that it makes me slow down, clear my mind and tune into a world of the tiniest proportions. The insects I discover then are colorful, in turn mighty or funny looking, and they often are tigers within their realm. Drag...
Invading the Hood
August 1, 2022
On a recent visit to Staten Island's Conference House Park, the lanternflies were everywhere. There were insect highways going up tree trunks, and more annoyingly, they'd fall back on us. Nobody likes bugs, missunderestimated* threat or not. Lanternfly on ID.4 • ♦ • * As someone not so famous once said.
Nostalgie du 14 juillet
July 14, 2022
Quelques vieilles photos de famille, un peu introspectives, tirées de scans récents d'un album jaunissant. Those were the days. Yours truly, blond and barefoot, gasping at the mightiness of who I might become one day, somewhere around Saint-Martin-Vésubie, Alpes Maritimes, France   Yours truly again, realizing I could not compete with the utterly cool and photogenic looks of my motherly ride—who happened to go sky-diving at age 81 a few years ago   Fir...
Mighty Wings
July 5, 2022
The Maine eagle gathering in the first pictures below is a seasonal occurrence. The birds of prey gather to feast on alewives in a small tidal estuary where the fish are corralled into narrow and extremally shallow water on their way upstream to breed and possibly die. This was the most eagles I have seen at one time, closely rivaled, however, by some sightings in Whitehorse, BC, circa 2007. Another post will come to sum up this trip to Maine last May. In New York Ci...
Of Time and Elasticity
Whether it is through extremely long exposures or the blink of a fast shutter, I always know that coming home and firing up the virtual lightbox to develop my shots, I will be treated to portraits of a parallel universe; a world I might have inhabited at the time of shooting but which flowed in many alternative directions and to the beat of countless additional tempos I just did not have the bandwidth for. Take the following snapshots for instance. Moments frozen in tim...
New York City in Spring
June 7, 2022
This is a benign post about those tiny details which, should one choose to accept them, can chisel an alternative reality into our lives as megapolis dwellers. Over nine million souls live within a eighteen-mile radius of our home. Needless to say, we are piled up on top of one another like sardines in the proverbial can. We can choose—and often do—the reality of traffic jams, news-promoted crime, corrupt politics, soaring inflation, omnipresent garbage and lamb chop sh...
Snowy Owls of Long Island
January 8, 2022
Possibly because of online birding sites and sighting maps, the last few times I found snowy owls, many others had as well and the scene was a comically static porcupine of long lenses trained on a stubbornly pensive bird squatting somewhere on a patch of sand. Not this time around. I was still basing my search area on previously reported sightings, but I also knew the spot from previous years and had decided to chance it despite a grey day and dull light. It appears ev...