A Vincent Mounier Photography Blog
Moody Table Mountain
July 26, 2010
Not all is ever smooth and peachy with Cape Town's weather. Table Mountain acts as an incredible torturer of skies, focusing the impact of conflicting air masses and unleashing strange downdrafts and pouring rains unto the city it dwarfs.
Below is an example. Approaching from the south and stuck in slow-moving traffic, we had ample time to marvel the mountain's magnificent impact on every aspect of the city's mood.
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Beyond False Bay, penguins and pristine waters
July 24, 2010
Back in January this year, when the Southern Cross was still filling our South African nightly skies and the FIFA World Cup was no more than a distant future thrill, we took the trusted Kombi for a drive around False Bay. Leaving Cape Town behind, we crossed the Cape Flats, zipped through Somerset West and wound our way along the edge of Cape Hangklip towards Betty's Bay.
The ocean was just delightfully turquoise and the sky streaked by rare cumulus. As always when exp...
Brooklyn rooftop picnics
July 20, 2010
The terrace is beautiful and lush, but its 66 square feet don't allow for much movement or lookout. At dinner, crossing my legs is a challenge and the Japanese grass keeps tickling my back. So once in a while we climb to the roof and picnic there, among satellite dishes, skylights and chimneys, with the wind in our face and the lifeless old windows of the hospital building for our only top neighbors.
The cat comes and joins us after a little coaxing. This is his kingdo...
The FIFA World Cup ends on a flop
July 11, 2010
If anyone wants to know what I think, bad football was played today in Jo'Burg, between two teams that did not show World Cup final flare. Nothing impressive, no brilliant moves, an incredible number of bad kicks and missed opportunities, too much pushing, pulling and falling, too much acting, too much pretending, and very questionable arbitration.
I'd say the referee did a pitiful job at controlling the field and preventing fouls, and showed poor judgment first handing...
Picnic on 3rd Beach, Clifton, Cape Town
July 10, 2010
In a little over 24 hours, the eyes of the world will focus on a single football, as an estimated* half a billion fans watch the FIFA World Cup final live from even the most remote corners of Earth. No broadcast event on the planet manages to capture the interest of so many people simultaneously.
I personally think that FIFA is too large a beast, probably rotten by corruption and in the simple business of making sheer profit. If as little as 5 percent of the advertising...
4th of July come and gone
July 7, 2010
I'm not one to celebrate nor appreciate National and Independence days much, whether a 4th of July, a 14th or a 1st. While people drink and party, I tend to ponder. It is so easy to raise a flag high and forget the atrocities that have led us where we are. I do not feel that ancient blood baths are anything worth celebrating, especially when they are actually being perpetrated all over again on some distant land. If anything, a day of mourning and remembrance would be more...
And New York sizzles...
July 6, 2010
While temperatures creep up and the Big Apple slowly fries under an unrelenting sun, the mercury having just busted a cruel 100°F (38°C) mark, it is sweet and a bit surreal to remember that last year, those were the brutal conditions we faced in Namibia and South Africa's Kgalagadi National Park.
More recently though, but just as hard to believe, we were having drinks on a Cape Town beach with loved ones and friends, celebrating the impending Cape Argus Cycle Tour - a...
An afternoon on the Cape of Good Hope
July 1, 2010
South of Cape Town, all the way down the Cape Peninsula, part of the Table Mountain National Park and next to Cape Point, is the famous Cape of Good Hope, southernmost part of the peninsula and often (falsely) labeled as the bottom tip of Africa.
First rounded in 1488 by Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias, the cape was initially named Cape of Storms and certainly has claimed its share of wrecks. Just a mile offshore, the warm Agulhas current coming down from the India...
South African Townships, the Nightmare Within a Dream
June 29, 2010
In 1994, when Apartheid fell, black South Africans must have seen their hopes soar far beyond barbed-wire fences and absolute repression. Everything was suddenly possible. The world, their world, had just become a better place.
Some 15 years later, as I ventured last March into Khayelitsha, second largest township in the country after Soweto, I was forced to admit that if the world had become a better place, this wasn't it. In the long, painful transition from radical ...
And... Action!
June 27, 2010
Below are the humbling results of my first video shoot with the Canon 7D. It's all quite laughable, really, since I am a complete amateur in this domain - and yet somehow, it feels promising and rather exciting, like the tip of an iceberg, its mass awaiting for me to commit, dive and explore...
Please keep in mind that while the 10 minute long, 50 MB streaming video below is highly compressed and shrunk to the Flash format, the H.264 full-1080p HD MPEG4 original is almo...
FIFA: Domenech's symbolic head-butt to Parreira, the new French tradition
June 23, 2010
Yesterday, on the green expense of a football field half-way around the globe, under the welcoming South African skies of the Free State, a stone's throw away from Lesotho, the two countries dearest to my heart were facing each other, a checkered ball between them. One of them made me feel ashamed.
The French lost the previous FIFA World Cup at the last second because of a ridiculous bad-tempered head-butt. They had otherwise behaved and played masterfully. This year, t...
At the beach
June 20, 2010
It would seem the fantastic emerging art of DSLR videography is going to challenge conventional photographers on concentration and focus levels, if you'll pardon the pun. When I shoot stills, I immerse myself completely in the scene and think only in terms of photography. Composition, settings, technique, lenses and goals are all specifically photo - and thus single-shot - oriented.
Video, however, ticks rather differently. It involves motion, time-lapse, the progr...