A Vincent Mounier Photography Blog
Monochrome Beauty
I will soon return to color but flowers have so much more than tones going for them; shapes, shades, textures - at times desaturation helps me find the essential, momentarily invisible to the Canon but never to the heart, Saint-Exupéry dixit...
Paper thin
The rain has stopped
Supernova
3 Comments
Missing the Skies
It is no secret that the sky is where I long to be, airborne, aloft, high. But this is not another rant about how much I miss flying. It is much more simple, yet infinitely deeper. After living in Harlem for almost a year, I have realized how lucky I had been for the previous twenty or thirty years of my life to have had uninterrupted, continuous visual access to a wide open sky.
I had never until now taken the time to ponder the visceral need to look up and around, ass...
A Terrace in Harlem
July 8, 2014
While Marie is adrift through the antipodes, weathering a stiff Cape Town winter with sweaters and the glow of twin fireplaces, I have inherited the care of our Harlem terrace and been granted the rank of Master Waterhose Handler.
I take my new responsibilities very seriously. True, it's a bit like making Gilligan the captain. I don't have the shoulders. When it comes to gardening, no shark here, I'm the minnow.
It goes all the way back to Antibes, France, circa 1974...
New York Abstract Fever
July 6, 2014
I was going to go from here to there and I was going do this or that. And then something happened and these came out. That's when I realized my lack of flexibility was just stiffness. So I stretched my canvas and mirrored the visions. Yup, I'll do better next time. No, this post is written in English. If it doesn't seem to mean anything, it's because the weekend didn't either.
I'll post flowers next, harmony soon to be restored.
Twins in Blue
Conflict on the Highline
July 3, 2014
Its construction having begun in 2006, the Highline is a city park built above street level on a re-purposed aerial train track. The idea came from a similar park in Paris which I have never seen. The use of otherwise abandoned and derelict space is brilliant and a beautiful greenway was created for all to enjoy without claiming an inch of extra city footprint. The skyborn garden is over a mile long and, now in early summer, lush and colorful.
Construction will have tak...
Gantry Plaza State Park 360 Panorama - Four Years Later
//
Following the stills I posted last week of Queen's Gantry Plaza State Park, here is a full spherical panorama of the very northern end of the park. The old gantries of which I had shot panoramas four years ago are hidden behind the trees to the south. The sun unfortunately disappeared while I was shooting the 80 images required for this panoramic scene, so it is a bit grey.
As always, click on the full screen icon at the top right of the pano, and then zoom in and ...
Old Steel, New Looks
June 25, 2014
This a simple photo post, the images shot on a recent short trip to Queens via the East River Ferry. I was testing various techniques, among which long exposures and a new kind of HDR-like blending called "fusion", promising but definitely not satisfactory yet. I also attempted a full 360 panorama using fusion, but I have not dealt with its 80 files, each 20 megapixel large and needing to be blended, processed and stitched...
So without a story, I hope you enjoy these r...
Staten Island Touch and Go
June 20, 2014
Unfortunately, it appears that every Saturday or Sunday, at about the same time we decide we should go somewhere for fun and a change of scenery, eight million New Yorkers reach the same conclusion and scramble. I'm not sure how our intentions are leaked, maybe I should check with Assange or Snowden. The bottom line is we all end up, it seems, competing for subway cars and breathable air.
Last weekend, Marie and I opted for a cross-city stampede, the whole shebang, nort...
New York Sightings - Citroën at Indochine
June 11, 2014
A beautifully old 2CV parked in front of the famous faux-French-colonial-Vietnamese restaurant. Appropriate I guess...
Bis Repetita Placent - A Run Around Table Mountain
June 9, 2014
The last two years have been rather rough in terms of running. I've been cursed by a fateful book and plagued by cramps. I'll soon post about that.
But back in Cape Town last December, I did manage to revisit one of my favorite Table Mountain runs, first charted in 2010.
The weather was dramatically different this time. While Cape Town's summer month of December is normally windy, sunny and dry, there had been an unusual amount of rain and clouds were still hanging l...
Of Life and the City
June 5, 2014
This post was born as a brief reply to a reader's very nice comment but I got carried away and wrote beyond the intended single paragraph. I hope - and expect - that I will take heat for it. Mine is a rather dark and negative view of life in the city. I know there is another side and I welcome comments.
But there are as many realities as there are sentient beings, and probably as many universes as the combined number of possible decisions made by those beings every second...
Timelapse from Riverbank State Park
June 2, 2014
Timelapse photography had been trending for a while, but with the emergence of 4K video, it has found a new meaning for itself.
The maximum pixel dimension of HD video is 1920 x 1080 pixels. This is much less than what modern DSLR cameras are capable of. So while photographers are able to shoot stills with 20+ megapixel resolution, when switching to video mode, they are using only a fraction of their sensor's power.
In comes 4K. The new video standard features resolu...