A Vincent Mounier Photography Blog
Language, My Loud Friend
April 15, 2018
It is a precocious, chilly morning and the doors of my Manhattan-bound F train open unto a few vacant seats. I have selected the forward-most car but going into town before dawn, conspicuously free seats often have just been used as a warm and relatively safe bed by homeless wanderers and that open space is eyed suspiciously by even the sleepiest of commuters. No one wants to be the first to sit down where a ghostly character with a terrifying lack of hygiene has spent the ni...
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The Road to Mokala, Part 5 - Bush Run
March 13, 2018
While Vancouver was blessed with the most spectacular playground a runner might ever dream of, South Africa has also delivered memorable—and at times challenging—trail runs. Whether it was running into the sunset on a deserted Mpumalanga hill, up and down Table Mountain the long, arduous way, or through the entire length of the Cape of Good Hope, the memories are sweet and sweaty.
SANParks are definitely not runner-friendly, though; between predation and regu...
Ballpoint Pen Up Close
February 16, 2018
While procrastinating about the last installment of the Road to Mokala series, I began wondering if my inkwell had dried. One thing lead to another and I ended up examining the situation through a makeshift macro lens. Here is the result.
Disclaimer, I did not clean the pen before this shoot, I just picked it up from my desk. Guess I need to clean the desk more often. This is done with an old Canon EF-S 18-55mm lens reverse-mounted on bellows and extension tubes. The lens ...
A Decade Passed, Long Live the Decade!
January 24, 2018
It was a lovely day of breaking the rules, of throwing preconceived ideas into the wind, of going back to the source, of shaving the unnecessary, of looking deep inside instead of out, of holding a single hand rather than many, of spending time with angels, of walking barefoot when shoes are in order, of wearing jeans because they feel good, of eating with bare fingers, of doing exactly what we wanted, of staring into the sunset while dreaming of sunrise, of not caring too mu...
The Road to Mokala, Part 4 - Vermilion, Ochre and Gold
January 22, 2018
Squarely sitting off the beaten track, Mokala National Park is remote enough that a lengthy dirt road approach would be required. Our paper map and Google's insights seemingly as prone to disagreement in second class areas of the Third World as the political factions that divide them, we hesitated and finally gambled on an early branch off from the N12 and a surreptitious arrival from below.
A rather perfidious absence of any road signs or directions to the park was u...
The Road to Mokala, Part 3 - Of Elephants and Mousebirds
December 31, 2017
A couple of eventful years ago, after driving up the spine of South Africa while wearily watching the glow of a lit t-belt light, our initial reward upon entering Kruger through the Orpen gate had been elephants, my first encounter with them in the wild. From neurotic mud-covered attractions swaying at the far corner of a smelly zoo enclosure, the magnificent giants had metamorphosed before my amazed eyes into the largest land mammals alive, and a force of nature to be reckon...
The Road to Mokala, Part 2 - Ride of the Tsitsikamma Dolphins
November 18, 2017
Dutifully purring her way up Sir Lowry's Pass on Cape Town's eastern flank with the Hottentot-Hollands peaks rising above us like unbelieving eyebrows, our beloved Landcruiser Mogashagasha, locked and loaded for a week-long foray far into the Northern Cape, felt about as comfortable to me as the proverbial saddle we were back in. Vinyl might have replaced worn-out leather and a weathered hat was still to come, but the rhythm was there and empty, beautiful space lay ahead.&nbs...
The Road to Mokala, Part 1 - Sahara Below
October 31, 2017
Almost twenty years ago, an old man, aged beyond reason by a systematic abuse of smoking, alcohol and anger, burst into tears one day at the memory of travels it turns out he regretted as much as he missed them. He had been at peace in Tahiti, in love in Mexico and had fought in Algeria. He was my estranged father, scarred forever by the mental wounds of war. He passed away soon thereafter, abandoned and cynical to the end.
I do not have a tombstone to visit because he wan...
Back from Africa, Reloaded
October 19, 2017
Eyes dreamy, heart loosened and memory sticks packed full of demanding pixels, I just flew back from South Africa, leaving behind a torn Marie who gets to enjoy a few more weeks of sheer Cape beauty, incomplete as it may when we are apart.
With another 3,000-kilometer road trip under her belts, the valiant Mogashagasha Landcruiser took us east and north to three different SANParks. There will be many pictures and a few stories to come, when the sea of time finally settles ...
September Central Park Hummingbirds
A moon ago, I decided on a whim to go seek hummingbirds in Central Park. We had found them in the Conservatory Garden years back while living in Harlem. Even though the season was about right for their fall migration, the garden yielded no luck. Having gone for a walk in the Ravine and beyond to look for birds of prey, however, I ended up finding a spot along a little creek humorously called the Loch where hummingbirds hung out, attracted by jewelweed and bright crimson cardi...
NYC Ferry to the Rockaways
August 30, 2017
New York City’s coastline, mixing lazy stretches of carefully orchestrated public space with the capriciously winding expense of nature turned to steel, clocks in at an amazing five hundred and twenty miles of intricate playground for anybody who is tuned to the presence of water. For the sake of comparison, the combined coastlines of Boston, Miami, Denver, Los Angeles and San Francisco cannot match the length of ours. Yes, I threw Denver in there for fun but it has no stat...
2017 Solar Eclipse
While others were spending hours if not days planning for this, I had a few minutes only to dash down to an open space and put my good old Canon G15 - only camera available at work - to good use. I first tried shooting through borrowed eclipse glasses but got crappy results. So I turned the density filter on, set manual focus to infinity, underexposed a couple of stops, and waited for the sun to travel through the right cloud density.
Here we go, merely a partial eclipse s...