Entries about Switzerland
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After so many years in Switzerland, we rely on the quarter-hourly chiming of the nearest church bell to know what the time is. Or, if we’re enjoying a summer evening, quickly looking across to the other side of the village.
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Using a drone isn’t all about “aerial photography”, but, for me, about the ability to get better angles for photos which are otherwise out of reach.
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After a lot of deliberation, a few months’ saving, and a lot of review videos and articles, I decided to buy a drone.
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Catching the ship from Faulensee to Sundlauenen, hiking through the forest past St. Beatus Caves to Merligen, and then home by paddle steamer.
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A spring-like day and an afternoon stroll around a little village on the shore of Lake Brienz.
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This year’s aim: see new places and try new things. Close to home, this means going out from home and documenting the village where I live as much as possible. Despite living here for nearly five years, the only parts of Faulensee I’ve really photographed have been the views from above the village or from home.
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I was half an hour early for an appointment at the Spiez council offices this morning, so I went for a brief stroll through the woods to the top of the vineyards while I was waiting. It was so peaceful, with fresh powdered snow slipping silently from the trees and only two or three other people there […]
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Low water levels in Lake Thun in winter reveal large expanses of foreshore.
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First shots with two new acquisitions: a super-wide lens and an RR90 shutter release cable.
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Before the proper snow arrived at the start of this year’s winter season, we visited Zermatt and visited the famous, much-photographed view of the Matterhorn from Riffelsee.
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Technology introduced by YouTube last year allows you to click, drag and change your point of view inside a video: watching the action and looking around the camera in any direction.
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High in the Swiss alps, the Aletsch glacier, various mountain climbers’ huts and the Sphinx observatory all seem to be impossibly high above the real world. However, the statistics for 2015 from the Jungfrau Railway show that they’re not as far from the everyday world as they feel.
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The valley at Zermatt is surrounded by nearly three dozen peaks with summits higher than 4,000 metres above sea level. The Breithorn is well-known as the “easiest” to ascend: although easiness is, of course, a matter of reference. The number of tiny, ant-like climbers on the slopes leading from the Breithorn Plateau was quite amazing, when […]
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Fast anderthalb Stunden in Begleitung der «Rotbiene»: der Rettungsdienst von Air Zermatt rund ums Matterhorn. Wenn ich mit 28 mit mehr Geld im Konto in die Schweiz gekommen wäre, wäre ich Helikopterpilot geworden. Weil meine Geschichte diesen Weg nicht folgte, muss ich mich mit ein paar Touristenflüge pro Jahrzehnt und das Zuschauen von solchen Dokumentarfilmen zurecht finden.
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Jo found that because we’d saved so many points on our supermarket card, that we could “afford” a kayak using points alone. A few days later, and a large and heavy cardboard box arrived on the post woman’s scooter trailer and we had our dinghy: an Intex Challenger K2.
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The hill above Aeschiried has been calling to me ever since we moved to Faulensee. It’s immediately obvious, when looking up the hill, that the views across the lake must be great. There are a few houses dotted across the hillside, and the sharp-eyed will notice a small ski lift leading up into the trees. […]
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Our regular swallow visitors have a preferred perch above the area around our house. And it’s just a few metres from our balcony.
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In which we start the hiking season as early as we possibly can, with the longest route we’ve done to date.
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Where my love for the square image format comes from, and how it is achieved in the Fujifilm X-T1 digital camera.
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There are plenty of little, almost unnoticeable roads around here, which lead up valleys and through forests to remote farm buildings and dead-ends. I like to pore over the Kümmerly + Frey maps – the Swiss equivalent of the British Ordnance Survey – to see whether there are any worth driving up.
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A solitary hiker walks the remote, single-track high alpine road between the Oberaarsee lake and the Grimsel Pass road, in canton Bern.
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A short film by Rick Steves about the unexpected artillery behind closed barn doors, and the overly-secure cellar bomb shelters beneath almost every Swiss home. The main installation featured is the Artilleriewerk Faulensee at the end of our road.
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A wonderful time-lapse sequence from the southern borders with Italy, ranging from the Nufenen Pass to Zermatt and the Matterhorn. Film maker Christian Mülhauser writes: Through fog, rain, snow and even wind gusts of up to 120 km/h I am happy to have completed this project. Mountains of Valais is by far my most time […]
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Sitting at my computer this afternoon, I spot, out of the window, a yellow plane droning lazily around above the village. Not a full-sized plane but a metre-long radio-controlled model, with a GoPro camera attached, filming today’s glorious winter day on the lake. I couldn’t resist taking a few photos for the pilot and chatting […]
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I’m proud that international picture agency Getty Images invited me to submit photos for their Flickr Collection a couple of years ago. Since then, I get the occasional request to add more and my small set now numbers 52 photos, with a dozen or so more currently awaiting approval. Although the percentage that I get […]
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I took a walk up through the woods from Heimwehfluh, near Interlaken. The top of the walk, after half an hour or so of wheezing and muscle aching, was high above the end of Lake Thun. Aside from enjoying the walk, having some exercise, and enjoying the view, I also discovered that the golf course […]
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Just as summer arrived in the Bernese Oberland late this year, so the first snow fall has arrived early. But that’s OK: the sun is shining and it looks beautiful.
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One of my landscape photos is chosen for a 2014 calendar, complied from submissions from the Swiss Twitter community.
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Here in Switzerland, a few active photographic members of social media website Twitter have decided to pool their resources and initiate a calendar of Swiss photos for 2014, featuring photos from a Flickr group entitled “Twalender 2014”. (Kalender being the German translation of calendar.) Flickr members can add up to five of their photos to the […]
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Sometimes I remember to take a photo just so that I can look at it one day in the future and say, “do you remember when we used to do this?” One day, this photo will be twenty years ago.
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The “Aareinseli” is a small, privately-owned island in the middle of the river Aare, just upstream of the Swiss town of Solothurn. The owners, who run a smallholding on the island, open the island to paying guests between May and September and offer an idyllic setting for social events: from a basic drinks reception to […]
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I thought that it’s about time that I write a little bit about the village where we live, given that we moved a year a half ago and I’ve since had the chance to (intermittently) extend my collection of photos. Faulensee is a small village tucked into the curve of the lake shore between Interlaken […]
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“Let me go climb these virgin snows,Leave the dark stain of man behind.Let me adventure and heaven knows,Grateful shall be my quiet mind.” Jonathan Conville Jonathan Conville was originally from Odiham in Hampshire, near where I grew up.
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The alpine passes in early or late season offer a reminder to the untamed nature of the mountains.
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Local lake shipping company BLS now runs a daily ship service in the winter months.
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The new, re-designed website is now online and is automatically optimized for visitors with iPads and smartphones. One of the aspects of the design is an improvement to how images in vertical format are displayed.
