A Vincent Mounier Photography Blog
The Lightroom Dopamine
January 21, 2019
Once upon a time—so long ago that in those days, fresh out of my diapers, I was learning to dive and to fly airplanes—I would set out with my beloved Minolta X-700 SLR and a few Vivitar Series 1 lenses, Kodachrome or Fujichrome film duly loaded, and go shoot through the Québec countryside.
The X-700 had been my first SLR, in an age of printed catalogs and advertising brochures, booklets and pamphlets. While the internet was already taking baby steps, manufacturers rel...
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Beached
January 16, 2019
Emboldened by my first snowy owl quest, I set out a couple of weeks ago on a southward drive to distant Jersey beaches, yet again following the ebb and flow of crowdsourced reports. It was a wee hour, spur of the moment decision in the middle of a bad weekend night. After a restless stack of bad dreams and worse wakefulness, endlessly tossing and turning in fear of the world's darkness like the Hobbits at Tom Bombadil's, I figured I could make better use of precious time. If ...
Two Worlds
January 10, 2019
High and low, near and far, micro and macro, slow and fast, grounded and aloft, threatened and free, orange and green, these opposites illustrate the complex tangle of our present lives. The Cape dwarf chameleon was stunningly photographed by Marie this morning in the luxuriant Constantia garden. I extracted the paraglider frame from an airborne video I shot late last year.
Suddenly I realize why, out of all the color combinations available for the Iota 2 canopy model, I c...
Short Quest for the Snowy Owl
A touch jealous about Marie's colorful reports of the Constantia garden birds, including a juvenile amethyst sunbird, I decided yesterday that South Africa would not monopolize the bird scene.
Over the years, North America has yielded quite a few amazing feathered encounters, from New York's hummingbirds and horned owls to Vancouver's congregations of bald eagles. How could I top these?
Easy. Find a snowy owl. Neither Marie nor I had ever been lucky enough to see one. T...
Henri
November 18, 2018
As my father-in-law struggles on a hospital bed half a world away, I can only look back to try and paint a sad smile on my face.
Henri arrived as an unexpected present, a decade after my own dad had passed away, and his endearing fatherly figure filled a void I had not thought could be tackled.
He was seventy-seven when I decided on impulse to join him on the Cape Argus Cycle Tour. He would do his on one lung. A year later, he led me up the famous India Venster hike to ...
Inaugural Flights with the Advance Iota 2
While butterflies flap their fragile wings across the globe and out of sheer chaos, like an artist with raw clay, shape our lives ever so slightly upon each flutter, distant, unseen reminders that every fragment of this universe is connected to all others at all times, and that events affecting us today were set in motion eons ago, Marie and I, at last, have landed in our new home. Could we have predicted it? Not a chance. Butterflies are shrouded with mystery, and so is chao...
Outage Recovery
September 26, 2018
Those of you having visited since last Friday will have been met by an error message. A catastrophic error was made by someone at my web hosting provider and server data was erased or corrupted beyond repair. Good old Murphy jumped in and it turned out two levels of back-up or redundancy were unusable so they had to restore thousands of customer accounts from the last line of defense, an older, slower server.
What this will do to their business, I cannot say. They are a sm...
I Fold, Therefore I Am
September 12, 2018
In moments of sheer panic about the unbearable pressure of being, these days, I am amused by the sense of comfort a neatly folded paraglider gives me.
Most everything in our life is actually out of control and a large piece of colorful fabric flapping in the wind won't change that tendency much, but folding a familiar item is soothing and it is like wearing blinkers to avoid seeing what could be coming at us sideways...
A neatly folded and bagged Iota 2 makes the chaos ...
It's Never Too Late to Jump
September 2, 2018
A bit before I showed up unceremoniously in '64, screaming for attention and throwing in a jaundice for effect, my dad had served as a paratrooper in the French army and landed in Algeria, a messy colonial war that left him scarred for the rest of his short life.
Many decades later, juggling the mid-eighties and my mid-twenties, and having failed to hustle work as a commercial pilot, I turned to skydiving as an upward escape despite its definitive association with gravity....
Advance Iota 2
July 28, 2018
The new paraglider is beautiful, a cheerful mix of orange, lime and white. Yes, that matters.
With a wingspan of forty-one feet, the glider only weighs a bit over eleven pounds. Even when packed along with a reserve parachute in my new reversible harness which doubles as a backpack, the whole kit will weigh a mere twenty-five pounds and suddenly, serious hiking is an option.
Of course I have not even had a chance to go kiting and I am awaiting the arrival of a new reser...
Apologies For The Messy Look In Here
July 18, 2018
I broke my last theme and will have to redo everything in here. Content remains unchanged but may be harder to find. I apologize for the inconvenience and promise to sort it all out as soon as possible....
The Soaring Fool Looks Skyward Again
July 14, 2018
Circumstances and life unfitting, it has been years since I flew my paraglider regularly. Oddly enough, it was my time in Little Cayman almost two decades ago that best allowed the escape freedom required to travel and fly. While the "rock" as we called our island was fever-inducing, the lifestyle was forgiving and I managed multiple vacations a year.
I learned the Art of paragliding in the French Alps near Chamonix and my first hops off a grassy slope were done facin...