A Vincent Mounier Photography Blog
A foreigner's take on Cape Town's new Stadium and the 2010 FIFA World Cup
February 8, 2010
Every four years, 32 teams gather in a host country to play 64 games of passionate football, watched by the entire civilized world, and most of the rest too. It's the FIFA World Cup. It's big. The 2006 final match in Germany was watched live by an estimated 715 million people. Each one of them saw an instant replay of Zidane heatbutting Materazzi. That's the power of television.
Four years later, South Africa is hosting the 2010 World Cup. The first match will be play...
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A Citroën 2 CV in Kalk Bay - Cherchez l'erreur
February 5, 2010
No, this isn't a Southern French beach picture. I took it yesterday on a stretch of remarkably turquoise water just outside Kalk Bay, South Africa. The adorable little car - and I'm not a fan of the colour pink, but this was preciously silly - is an old Citroën 2 CV.
The 2 CV wasn't only driven by Inspector - pardon me, Chief Inspector Clouseau. It's actually one of France's most iconic cars ever built. Its production began just after WW2 and the car was literally meant ...
Even more chameleons...
February 2, 2010
Ok, this has become more than a hobby, I now feel under a pseudo-scientific obligation to document the whereabouts of those absolutely adorable creatures. We've finally found Cape Dwarf Chameleons in a different area, much closer to the house, which lets us hope they might some day come back to the garden - even though we suspect there could be too many carnivorous birds around the house to allow chameleons to move back in.
They seem to favour the bright green livery no ...
More Cape Dwarf Chameleons
February 1, 2010
Marie and I have now found a minimum of 10 individuals, 4 of which are much smaller and probably younglings... They all live in a 20 to 30 meter radius of each other, and we still have to find a single chameleon outside of that area. The reason is still unknown. We've decided to be discreet about their location to protect their privacy; Cape Dwarf Chameleons are, after all, endangered.
Anybody with valuable information about the species and an iron-clad reference letter ...
South African update
January 31, 2010
34 degrees of latitude south. Very comfortable bottom tip of the African Continent. South of us, I was thinking today, is a maritime void that drops all the way to Antarctica. Ships rounding the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Agulhas probably do so in an affectionate fashion, keeping land in sight, wary of open seas. Nearby, they know, the mighty Atlantic and Indian Oceans collide. And the skies over there, where no landmass remains, are surely empty too, exempt of air traffic...
Panoramas
January 30, 2010
Below are a few modest panorama attempts. My little pano head gizmo is working really well and I'm slowly getting used to shooting panos in less than 15 minutes a piece. I'm hoping the silly mistakes of doing an arbitrary 30 deg. panning with the lens mistakenly zoomed in - and thus failing to overlap - and leaving the polarizing filter on are things of the past. I've got it down to just a few minutes in the field, plus some 30 to 45 minutes of post-processing for a single...
The Garmin Forerunner on Table Mountain
January 27, 2010
The first best purchase I ever made towards my running career was a simple pair of running shoes. They were Nike Air Max Assail II trail runners bought for $89 at a highway-side outlet in Minnesota. I never noticed they were trail running shoes. I didn't bother with stride style or supination. I tried them on and they fitted both my feet and budget like gloves. Basically, I bought them because I liked the way they looked.
They lasted me well over 1500 km without flinch...
Running around Cape Town's Table Mountain
January 24, 2010
With the 2010 FIFA World Cup* coming to South Africa this summer, or rather this winter as we are in the Southern Hemisphere, crowds will no doubt descend on Cape Town like flocks of vultures circling a tourism prey. Some will be hooligans and care only about drinking and causing trouble in the name of their team. I wish them to fail and be arrested. Others, I hope, will arrive with healthier aspirations and a few might even be able to focus on something other than soccer....
Cape Dwarf Chameleon found!
January 22, 2010
After two years of patient hopes and a few bursts of frantic investigation, we have finally found the lost family track of the Cape Dwarf Chameleon, endangered specie as per CITES.
They had disappeared from Maureen's Constantia garden years ago but sightings were still being reported by various friends of ours in the greater Cape Town, so we set out on yet another survey of the green belt, a long path of nature right behind the house. The dogs were happily running around...
African skies
January 18, 2010
This year's trip to South Africa was a textbook example of glitchless-ness. We rose at dawn in Brooklyn, left the apartment at 7:15 AM and caught a cab a block away on the taxi corridor as we always do. The driver accepted to tackle Atlantic Avenue rather than the BQE, a cheaper, more pleasant and usually faster approach to JFK from our 'hood.
At the aiport, there were no more than a handful of passengers in the line to the South African Airways counter. Bags were tagged...
Soon airborne to South Africa
January 15, 2010
Coriolistic Anachronisms, already a little dazed by winter's numbing caress, is going to slow down even further while Marie and I escape across the Atlantic Ocean to Africa. For the two months to come, I will only be posting brief and sporadic teasers from the road. I will, however, be taking photos like crazy and should have a lot to write about once we get back.
My goal this year is to concentrate on large scale panoramas and HDR. The new Manfrotto tripod and its ball...