A Vincent Mounier Photography Blog
Google Wave Invites Available!
My Google Wave invites have just been replenished. I've got a few to give away if you are interested. Just ask very nicely. A thoughtful comment would be nice. Or some barter exchange. A script. A piece of software. I don't know. Surprise me.
Update 5: No more invites available for the time being, I'll wait until the ones I sent have been activated, which hasn't happened yet. I guess the latest wave (pardon the pun) of invites released to current users overwhelmed the...
22 Comments
Much to do these days...
October 27, 2009
I've fallen behind in posting and picture-processing but fear not, I've got fall colours brewing from our wonderful trip upstate, and various older posts pending. In the meantime, Marie has documented it all beautifully over at 66 Square Feet...
Getting bent for the Brooklyn Bridge
October 16, 2009
Fellow divers, did you know that the first people to get bent were not divers but bridge builders? You see, decompression sickness (DCS) - also labeled decompression illness (DCI) when diagnosed and treated on a common ground with the similar arterial gas embolism, was actually born under the name of "Caisson Disease" and although it involved pressure and the surrounding water, its unlucky victims certainly never saw little fishies. They were building a bridge. ...
Calvary: Old Stones, New Skyline
October 12, 2009
It's a rare sight. You walk up a small hill through a parterre of pretty white tombstones on well kept grass, aiming for the deepest blue autumn sky above, and suddenly, among the crosses and seemingly one of them, a familiar silhouette. Tall, slender even, stylish and sharp, it's the Empire State Building. You're in the Calvary Cemetery in Queens - that's the middle of nowhere, or maybe slightly north of it.
Getting there without wheels isn't so casual. It involved i...
Dazed in Harlem
October 11, 2009
I'm miserably dragging my bones, today. The subway ride wasn't even that long yet stations lazily drifted by like distant planetary stops on an endless journey to the universe's end. I wonder if I've got a fever. Space travel is said to be hard on you.
As I sip my coffee at a terrace, a warm autumn day lighting up the wide Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd, Harlem is asleep around me. Its Dutch roots forgotten, the renaissance of the 20's a pale memory, later crime and drug r...
The crossing of the Atlantic Antic
October 8, 2009
I'm late. The crossing is long over. 'Been working on the web site and picture processing took a plunge. Anyhoo, here's the deal:
Once a year, Atlantic Street is blocked off between below Henry all the way to 4th. Nearby stores and others not so near send in a crew and set up little street kiosks. Everything goes, from food to drinks to arts to hats to music and events. Then hundreds of thousands of people flock in. The place is jam-packed. It lasts all day.
So the cro...
Stripey background and unity
October 5, 2009
With many - rather average but interesting - pictures on hold, the last week has seen me obsessively reworking the main site's look and feel, and trying to integrate the blog into it more seamlessly. A striped background has emerged because, well, I always liked stripes. And they serve the unifying purpose very well.
The good old winged dolphin logo was reborn and modernized, another thing I'm quite fond of despite its age. Entry date display was upgraded from the origi...
HDR Revisited
October 1, 2009
This will be a revisit of my old HDR tutorial. After much trial and error, I have to come to better understand what I like in HDR, and what I dislike. Here is the difference between a raw image and an HDR composite:
That's it!
Shaking New York's Pandora's Box - Part 2
September 24, 2009
There was an excursion to the northernmost tip of Manhattan, an elevated outpost bordered by much water and covered in urban forest. We walked through Fort Tryon Park, past the Cloisters, to Inwood Hill Park and around the bend, along the mouth of the Harlem River to have shish kebabs on a bench.
There were walks along the banks of the East River, Brooklyn side, at and past sunset. A sad realization there, as it turns out that the entire Promenade - which is built right ...
Turn your faulty IE into Chrome with a simple plugin!
September 23, 2009
Everybody knows it: Internet Explorer sucks. It sucks mostly because even in its 8th version, it still isn't standard-compliant. The other four major players in the browser field, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari, have synchronized their efforts and achieved a rather similar level of compliance. Web designers can target them globally and obtain very consistent results. But IE remains a mystery. No matter what, version after version, it just doesn't manage to catch up with...
Menu update, some site maintenance
September 20, 2009
The menu is evolving. Granted, my icon collection is somehow limited and I'm not such a great icon designer myself. I will have to do something about the ones above, though, because they aren't all really relevant. But this is all happening in stages.
The latest stage, as it is, was two-fold: I created a succinct "Rules Of Conduct and Copyrights" page, linked to from the main menu. It explains my candid expectations in terms of visitor behavior - yes, I allow ...
A new top menu for the blog!
September 14, 2009
The most unrelenting readers among you might have noticed design fluctuations in the top part of the blog over the last three days. I apologize for the inconvenience; I was upgrading the top menu and later conducting some heavy testing. Not having an option to test offline, I had to work live, and be visible about it. I give you, tada... the Mac-looking Icon Menu! Yawn.
It's all over now and as I sit at home resisting the urge to scratch, corticosteroids having been taper...