A Vincent Mounier Photography Blog
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...
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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
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
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* 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
June 29, 2022
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
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...
Hummingbirds of Fall 2021, a Summary in Pictures
Another autumn is behind us and soon, the snowy owls will be arriving. For now, enjoy a glimpse of these ruby-throated hummingbirds on their breathtaking journey across the continent, feeding non-stop as their wings flutter fifty times a second, their heart pumping at a dizzying seventy-two thousand beats per hour.
Echoes
June 16, 2021
While the world still struggles with a stubbornly cruel pandemic, there is at last local progress and as NYC claims a seventy percent vaccination rate, our lives are veering back towards what was once normalcy, if there ever was such a thing.
This weekend we did the unthinkable; we stood in line without a mask—even though distancing—and hopped onto a maritime instrument of public transportation, a.k.a. a ferry, along with a plethora of our fellow and so colorfully diver...
Maine Creatures Great & Small
June 12, 2021
Borders remaining stiff, we badly needed an escape and took a few days to revisit our favorite Maine spot. Fall had turned early summer, or rather late spring. But the forests were as lush, the sea everchanging and wildlife was delightfully abundant.
Here is a brief kaleidoscope of the creatures and plants that made us smile or sigh sometimes, including a family of foxes right by the shoreline.
Short-tailed weasel
Foxes!
Bald eagle
&n...
Revisiting the Flying Years
February 20, 2021
I have updated this old post about my flying years with vintage pictures, only worth reading if you really like aviation or very old, damaged color prints.
X-ray Oscar Yankee (also known as XOY) and yours truly