A Vincent Mounier Photography Blog

New York City Sleeps
May 25, 2015
This is an eerie sight for a Monday morning. The party must have been harsh last night. Here is the view down 6th Avenue towards the south, Macy's right behind me Not Shot With My iPhone 6 (but with my Samsung)
Deer Friends...
May 17, 2015
These are slack times when it comes to blogging and photography. I am New York-saturated. Better days will come. For now, a single image of deer in Cold Spring a couple of weekends ago - there were seven or eight of them, a bit skittish but a nice sight so close to civilization. Skittish
Roosevelt Island - 360 Degree Panorama
May 6, 2015
// Following the stills I posted this week of my last Roosevelt Island outing, here is a full spherical panorama shot near the new park. This was shot in HDR, or rather Exposure Fusion which is my new go-to HDR-like technique but does not involve tone mapping, because I needed the latitude of bracketed exposure to compensate for wide extremes between the glowing white of the stones and a relatively dark skyline and river. So the sky looks a little surreal, apologies for...
More Spring on Roosevelt Island
May 3, 2015
Our last visit two years ago was in later winter, traces of snow lingered on the ground and the air was bitingly crisp. This time around, blossoms and people competed for attention and a space which, as I have said before, is so insipid in a way that one seeks inspirational sights on the nearby shores of Manhattan and Queens. Manhattan is saturated and only manages to grow upwards, a spiky architectural statement emerging from the foam of lower buildings now and then. I...
Bridge Over The River Hudson
April 18, 2015
They say time travel is still science-fiction. I beg to disagree. We have already invented it and use it on a daily basis. Sort of. A few centuries past, leaving Cape Town bound for New York, one would have had to follow the clipper route to the east, going the long way, and the trip would have taken uncomfortable months, disease lurking, mutiny at hand and storms ruling randomly over the outcome of the journey. More recently, a hundred years ago or so, a traveler wo...
A Train Up The Hudson
Like a giant - if anatomically incorrect - octopus, five main Metro-North railroad lines and their sub-routines spread from Manhattan and Jersey City, fanning up into the states of New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. They constitute a commuter rail system with over one hundred and twenty stations, serving three states and reaching some ninety miles out of Penn, Grand Central and Hoboken in multiple directions. Commuting here does not come cheap considering that the ma...
Chinatown Touch-And-Go
March 28, 2015
So I had a craving. The goods? Pork buns. The source? Chinatown. The catch? None, other then, well, an expedition out of Harlem boundaries and into Chinalem - the smells, the sights, the sounds being crystallized, as if heightened and enhanced by an almighty cynical hand, amplified and thrown back at me with a challenging smirk. I grabbed a camera and lenses, put a backpack together, allowing for internal food-carrying space and plotting various heat escape vectors - le...
If It Is March, It Must Be Winter
March 20, 2015
I might have to panic. My instructions covered watering and spring rebirth, not snow plowing - new age composting, not thawing the yeti. Oh well. At least the sourdough is safe in the fridge. "Ya stopped on a fresh red light, ya moron! Five of us coulda' gotten through!"
The Simplest Things
March 16, 2015
Whether it is bubbly, salmon, bread and butter, milk tarts for dessert and a luxuriant garden all around for lunch, candlelit suppers, simple salads with a magic touch, or even an overlook of Kalk Bay's Olympia Cafe with creamy polenta on the way, these are the simple things I miss tonight, while broccoli steams dutifully and red wine tastes heavy on the heart and smoky on the palate. Last lunch before the flight back, winter 2014 The good news is these are not lost fo...
Have Mercy, Pam
March 13, 2015
The chart below was issued by the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) at 12:00Z which would be some 5 hours ago as I quickly post this on Friday afternoon lunch break. Category 5 cyclone Pam is charging through the Vanuatu islands on a south-southeast course. The eye wall appears to have come some twenty miles from the capital Port Vila, with wind gusts of 325 km/h or 200mi/h! Maximum wave height, 45 feet. Cyclone Pam Now why would one care about a storm racing thro...
Airborne, YUL-LGA
March 7, 2015
Being more accustomed to transcontinental flights these days - the long-haul, settle-in, find your sweet spot and economize patience and energy, ocean-facing departures, high altitude cruise and straight-in approaches, much movie watching despite the small screens, LCD's reflecting the confinement, cabin crew diving in turns to their secret rest area below deck, flight crew doing the same below the cockpit, hours going by in slow motion while the world spins wildly below -...