Permanent Tourist

by Mark Howells-Mead

Posts from the category Nature

  • Sgurr Mhairi from Ashaig

    Squalls in Skye

    To hell with warm, sunny days. Let the squalls come.

  • Low water levels in Gwatt

    Below the water line (again)

    Exceptionally low water levels at Lake Thun, as part of a four-year routine.

  • The photogenic season

    Autumn: the most photogenic of seasons.

  • Starling in a fig tree

    Not a waste of fruit

    Neighbours who worry about fruit, and nature which gets there first.

  • Funnels for non-existent rainwater

    I love that the pumpkin leaves are shaped like little funnels, to catch and redirect the rainwater. Now all we need is some rainwater.

  • Cannibals in autumn

    In which I tell a short tale about cannibals.

  • Swallows on a telephone wire

    Last of the swallows

    Last of the swallows for this year, I suspect. I haven’t seen them around much this year at home, but there were dozens out yesterday, feeding their young before their long journey. (We have a perfectly-positioned telephone wire near our balcony, so it’s a great spot to watch and to photograph them.)

  • Bluebells in Switzerland

    Until I moved to Switzerland, my interest in photography was mainly confined to recording what I was up to; from time with friends and family, to documentary photography on the streets of London and capturing scenes when I was on holiday. I had begun getting interested in landscape photography after a few visits to the…

  • The winds from the south

    Southerly winds form cloud waterfalls in the high mountains of the Swiss Alps.

  • Aerial photograph of the Aletsch glacier in Swiss canton Valais

    The unstoppable loss

    Because the Aletsch glacier is inevitably melting so much, the adjacent mountain ridges are beginning to destabilize.

  • Faulensee, Switzerland

    Below the water line

    Low water levels in Lake Thun in winter reveal large expanses of foreshore.

  • Gwatt nature reserve, Thun

    Gwatt nature reserve, Thun

    I just came across a short film I made in January and posted to YouTube at the time. Filmed with my X100 and edited quickly in iMovie, it shows the publicly accessible lake-shore nature reserve at Gwatt, some fifteen minutes’ drive from home.

  • Above the clouds

    The “Nebelmeer” (lit. sea of cloud) is a fabulous meteorological phonemenon at this time of year, caused by a band of dense cloud sealing cold air beneath it in alpine valleys.