A Vincent Mounier Photography Blog
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
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Of Blogging and Entropy
February 18, 2021
Well my first post of the year, long overdue, is not loaded with new photos.
Instead, I am going to ramble about these premises, how attached I am to my blog space, and yet how pointless it remains.
I started this blog in 2004 while living in Little Cayman. Back then I sported a deep black Compaq Presario laptop and connected to Cable & Wireless internet through an internal modem and a phone line, at pitiful speeds. The first images I posted, mostly underwater sh...
If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Maine
November 18, 2020
After two hundred debilitating days of quasi-total isolation, of hunkering down and stocking up, of washing hands, clothes and goods at a frenzy, of avoiding our kind like the new plague, and of barely buoying our sanity up through carefully distanced local park visits, Marie and I might have succumbed to cabin fever had she not, long in advance and out of sheer wisdom, booked a Maine cottage for a week.
September had found us pale and weak, not so much in physical term...
Holding One's Breath
November 4, 2020
On a vu souvent
Rejaillir le feu
De l'ancien pays
Qu'on croyait trop vieux
Il est, paraît-il
Des terres brûlées
Donnant plus de liberté
Qu'un meilleur novembre
Et quand vient le soir
Pour qu'un ciel flamboie
Le rouge et le bleu
Ne s'épousent-ils pas?
Ne nous quitte pas
Ne nous quitte pas
Oh Démocratie
Ne nous quitte pas
Bald eagle, Staten Island, USA, September 2020
Did Someone Say Noise?
August 22, 2020
Out at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife refuge yesterday afternoon, Marie and I were treated with the usual plethora of animal activity, a myriad of birds including multiple ospreys, a raccoon scurrying up the beach, a muskrat grazing on lush grass, and then, to our utter surprise as it is quite early in the season, we saw this charming little thing:
Female ruby-throated hummingbird (I think)
Now this was shot with my trusted, beloved, outstanding Canon 5D Mark IV and the 100-...
Seals!
May 9, 2020
Spotted a few weeks BC*, these two seals sat on a rock in weak afternoon light, dutifully soaking in the invisible waves of a pale sun, a stone's throw from the beach.
Perched
Of all places in and around the city, Staten Island has over the years yielded the steadiest stream of cool fauna, bald eagles, ospreys, snakes, deer, groundhogs, salamanders, musk rats and now these adorable fury fluffs.
Adding to this list the dolphins and snowy owls of other bea...
Sweet South African Birds
April 12, 2020
The Western Cape is home to amazingly colorful birds, both in character and plumage. These were seen earlier this year in the Constantia garden and nearby Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden.
Just as we name any garden chameleon Meeleon, any male Whydah is called Charlie. We don't like him much as he bosses everyone around like an overzealous Bobby on a London street. But maybe we should empathize with his burden of carrying such a tail around...
Charlie
The swee...
Chameleons, 2020 Edition
April 6, 2020
With the world having plunged in utter chaos, looking at those pictures taken in the Constantia garden in February 2020 B.C. (Before COVID) makes me smile. They are such a good antidote to stress and worry. Boy George is right—they come and go—but I have yet to fail finding at least one chameleon, on any given trip to Cape Town, somewhere in the garden or the adjacent green belt.
Meeleon
These are photos of the same specimen hanging out in a tree at the bottom of the g...
South Africa From The Air
April 1, 2020
The images below are set in a pre-pandemic world, or rather, in hindsight, an early pandemic stage since the giant was already slowly but surely awakening and taking its first baby steps, soon to become devastating leaps. I had met Marie for a week in Cape Town, a last-minute trip decided after my May business travel plans had been canceled and future escapes seemed doomed.
Marie had arrived early and was staying behind a while longer, and when I got back to the States ...
Supermoon
March 15, 2020
Maybe a week ago, a touch before rationality gave in and fearmongering finally hijacked society, Marie and I were having a drink on the terrace, toasting to a precocious spring on the blue marble. Suddenly, we heard the plaintive cry of a young supermoon.
"La-la-laaaaaaa......"
Supermoon over Brooklyn
P.S. Notice the plane silhouette over the moon. Sorry it's not sharper, NYC's heat blur is an issue, even in winter...
P.P.S. Yes, it is dark in here, I am going th...
Homecoming
March 4, 2020
So high above all the rampant worry and fear, aboard the smart Airbus 350-900 of a struggling South African Airways, cutting across the Gulf of Guinea towards the equator and a vast ocean at a modest thirty-six thousand feet—multiple step climbs will follow as fuel gets burned and the aircraft lightens, culminating at forty-one or forty-two thousand feet—Marie is leaving home to come home.
Sweet and sour for her but I can't wait.
I'll soon post some aerial pictures o...
Against All Odds
January 13, 2020
Yes, eight and a half million souls merrily sharing three hundred square miles of prime real-estate is a lot. Way too much in fact, as is the case for any large city. The very notion that I spent seven idyllic years on a Caribbean island almost exactly the size and shape of Manhattan where I personally knew most of the hundred and fifty inhabitants (including a few fish) still boggles my mind.
However with some five hundred and seventy-eight miles of shoreline, New York...