A Vincent Mounier Photography Blog
Return to Chamonix, Part 3 – SIV Over Lake Annecy
That first night in Chamonix, we sleep blissfully and get up in Goldilocks fashion, not too early nor too late, preparing strong coffee with the provided stove-top espresso maker. Marie has smuggled a batch from Brooklyn, a special Beirut roast recommended by Gus at the Atlantic Ave Damascus Bread and Pastry Shop. It is even more finely ground than Sahadi’s wonderful Moka Java and almost oily. It rewards us with superb coffee, yet we will never know if that result is due t...
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Return to Chamonix, Part 2 – Club Alpin Français
Seated in the garden behind the Chamonix house, a glass in hand and dreamy eyes on the peaks above, I set my thoughts adrift and land in Côte d'Azur, long, long ago.
Tucked against a small cape covered in towering pine trees and lapped at by the scintillant Mediterranean Sea, the flowery town of Antibes might as well be my birth place as it is where my first solid memories emerge from the void.
Growing up there in the seventies meant spending summers at the beach and...
Return to Chamonix, Part 1 – France Is In The Air
August 10, 2019
The year is 2019. With the exception of a couple of brief, in-airport layovers while flying to or from South Africa with my head in the clouds and thoughts adrift, it has been a decade and a half since I committedly set foot on French soil. A small eternity.
So when, casually brandishing the double-edged sword of patriotism and paragliding, Marie uses a little leverage to try and pry me out of work and convince me that a France trip is unconditionally needed, I only hes...
Mountains!
June 12, 2019
Just back from the Alps, a headful of beauty and the many magical instants—which together a memory make—are keeping Marie and I up and running. I will find time to sort, develop and comment many pictures. Soon. Stay tuned.
Mont Blanc panorama (P.S. We did not walk up!)
Why do people climb mountains? Because they are there.
Answer attributed to Mallory.
Main Site Design Updated!
May 15, 2019
The main galleries have a new look! I have decided to keep a dark theme for the VMP gallery section as it better suits a purely photographic experience, and a light theme in here (the blog) where content is text-based.
The VMP galleries are always accessible from the menu above but if you'd like to pay it a visit now, here is your chance. I have updated the galleries with pictures featured on the blog recently and will keep refreshing the various sections with my favori...
Lisbon
March 10, 2019
February 2019, somewhere over the Atlantic. Having grown up in the friendly sun of a Southern France small town, with blue skies to dream in, flowers to roll into and la sieste to recover, I am apprehensive about first setting foot on Portuguese soil, fearing the biased comparison that will unavoidably occur. I have never visited the country and am somewhat prejudiced, probably deterred in part by a harsh-sounding language my French and Spanish tongues cannot sufficiently ...
Happy Birthday Ntiniwe!
March 2, 2019
"What on Earth were you both doing drinking Champagne at night in the car, parked on the street a block from home?" you might ask. A weird picnic?
Better. A celebration. One year ago, the new VW Golf Ntiniwe materialized in our lives, giving me back my wings and us, our freedom.
Her name is Ntiniwe. Ntini is the Zulu and Xhosa word for the Cape clawless otter. She is gray, nimble and cute, it was appropriate.
We had planned to mark the occasion and go somewhere fu...
Fox One!
February 18, 2019
Marie and I drove down to the Jersey beaches this weekend on the snowy owl lottery. It was a lovely day, almost spring-like, and a very enjoyable drive both ways. Jersey fascinates us, strange melting pot of extremes, oscillating from bad to great, from odd to quirky, tacky to chilled, industrial to pristine.
Working our way down a monstrous highway—seven lanes wide at times, that's fourteen lanes of round-trip traffic—we settled into a fast flow and landed at Island Be...
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 relie...
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. ...
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, ...
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...