A Vincent Mounier Photography Blog
Coming soon...
July 12, 2012
A rant about my barefoot running struggle. A cruise ship medley. More glimpses of the macroverse. Stay tuned!
For now, here is a peculiar scene of an ant nursery. I lifted a log recently in Staten Island's Wolves Pond Park, in search of salamanders. What I found instead was a busy ant nest. As soon as exposed, the poor insects began frantically relocating their nursery, and I snapped a few shots.
Only once looking at the image full-screen back at home did I realized ...
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AF447 - The Plane that Never Arrived - Final Report
On July 5, 2012, after an investigation that lasted over three years, the French Bureau d'Enquête et Analyse released its final report on the crash of Air France flight 447 which was lost at sea between Rio and Paris on June 1, 2009.
There were no major surprises in the conclusion which mostly confirms what intermediate reports had hinted to since the late recovery of black boxes a year ago. Jean-Paul Trouadec, head of the BEA, introduced the report by saying that the c...
I Was Not There...
June 29, 2012
So I can't tell you much about it.
I know that people were wondering if the recent dropping of the fence, the truck tire tracks in the mud, the clearing of neighboring grounds, the sudden dash of activity, the loud noises coming from inside the buildings, the strange absence of No Trespassing signs and the luxurious cars of contractors parked on a demolition-looking site meant renovation, upscale real estate deal slash bribe, or plain and simple leveling. Either way, I ...
Digging Through Old Raw Memories
June 26, 2012
I was recently sorting out images for non-blog-related purposes and spent a whole day flipping through the virtual pages of my meticulously archived pictures, month after month of year after year...
The following were dug out RAW of dusty folders and re-developed with the much improved algorithms of Lightroom 4, which I adore. They are never-before-seen images, at least in their current rendering.
It's interesting to see how, while the pixels remain unchanged, vision...
Countryside Perfection Forty Minutes from Times Square
June 23, 2012
In Staten Island's Loretto Uniquely Deserted Area, one feels at peace. There are few people around, nature prevails, inner calm settles in. But no matter how hard one tries to forget the reality of that location, it is still part of the Five Boroughs and as such, yields an urban-rated illusion of escape.
For a real dose of countryside, what the French call "la campagne", one must be willing to travel a little further - distance-wise at least because the time spent in tr...
Travel to the Macroverse
June 20, 2012
In 2008 while living in Vancouver, I started playing with macro photography. I could not afford good glass and wasn't sure I was ready for it any way. So I experimented with all kinds of low-cost alternatives, most cumbersome and awkward, in various combinations of camera, tripod, focusing rails, bellows, extensions tubes, rings and reverse mounted lenses. The results, however, were fascinating.
Perfect coil - The prehensile tip of a gloriosa lily
Macro photo...
Mount Loretto, Staten Island - Mirage or Reality? - Part 2
June 17, 2012
As promised, here are the very many critters found in the Mount Loretto Unique Area and State Forest, Staten Island.
Osprey hunting (composite)
Flying south
Ibis
Mount Loretto, Staten Island - Mirage or Reality? - Part 1
June 13, 2012
In need of exotic freshness, I once drew our public transit maximum range circle on a map, its centre pinned on our Brooklyn apartment. It turned out the most distant point I could reach aboard the MTA subway system was the very bottom tip of Staten Island, about 30 kilometres from home as the crow flies.
Staten Island is the southernmost New York City borough and it is also the emptiest. Served by only four bridges and a ferry, the island is awkwardly isolated from the...
More New York Harbor Scenes
June 9, 2012
Taken from boats, docks, rooftops, islands and other locations. Urban shorelines, all of them. Contrasting. Conflicting. Polluted. Populated. And yet, water makes it all better.
Manhattan and Jersey City in the haze
Gangway
The giants
By the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge
Leaving the Staten Island Ferry terminal
High-rise
Going home
Spanish Navy training vessel
Released
On patrol
Verrazano-Narrows Bridge
Resisting progress
Life saver colors
Van Cortlandt Park
June 6, 2012
In a constant effort to push the boundaries of our small urban sphere and to test the limits of the NYC transit system, we recently visited Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx.
Surprisingly for a park, I managed to bring back tones of mostly reds and oranges. Go figure. Based on my previous post, I would say I am having one of my cyclic blue-and-green overdose episode.
Seeing red
Still seeing red
And more red
The travelers
Pit stop
This was very early May ...
American Southwest Slot Canyons - Here There be Magic
June 2, 2012
In 2004, about a year before I began blogging, I decided to go on a photography-slash-paragliding road trip to Utah and the Four Corners. I brought my Swing Argus paraglider along, bought a Canon G3 for the occasion and rented a 4x4 Jeep in Salt Lake City for two weeks.
Ahead of me lay thousands of miles of dry, heat-scorched, blood orange tinted landscape, a world of stone, sand and immense skies. I would drive for 10 days, camping in national parks, and then...
New York Through the Eyes of a Visitor
May 22, 2012
Marie and I were recently walking around the Big Apple with her mother, visiting from South Africa. This was not a first visit but I always ponder what the visitor could see that I don't, so this time I logged my camera along, as did Marie.
Here are glimpses of what our guest might have seen, as her eyes drifted hesitantly across the cityscape and her brain must have fought bravely to process such information overload.
It is so easy to start taking our surroundings f...