Blog posts about Jo at Permanent Tourist

Today marks the fifteenth anniversary of my first arrival in Scotland to meet the love of my life.

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Your author as a mysterious fictional character.

The “camera obscura” was the precursor to the modern camera.

A brief history of ten years using the online photo-sharing service Flickr.

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.

One of the most challenging hikes I’ve done: up the steep and winding path through the forest from Beatenberg to the summit of the Niederhorn.

A long-held ambition fulfilled: to hike to my favourite glacier near the Susten Pass in Switzerland.

With surprising alacrity, it’s time to flick back through my digital album as we approach the end of 2013, and the end of another year behind the camera. Here are a few highlights; a larger set is on Flickr. My favourite memory of 2013, embodied in the lead photo of this blog post (above)? Visiting […]

If it weren’t for the fact that I have a lovely, daily reminder, it would be difficult to believe that it’s been nine years since I first met Jo in person. We’d started exchanging e-mails ten months earlier and I visited her and her parents in Scotland in October 2004, since when we’ve been together. […]

As we were so near the border when we visited Bavaria in October, we drove over into the Czech Republic to add the thirteenth country to the list of those I’ve visited. There’s not much in this region and in order to avoid paying a motorway toll – as we were only there for an […]

Jo posed for me in the stairwell to an underground car park during last Sunday’s Swiss Strobist practical day, whilst I fiddled with the camera white balance to create an unusual effect.

It had long been a goal of Jo’s and mine to extend our walking and “bag” one of the Lakeland fells. However, we hadn’t anticipated doing so in quite such a challenging way.

I return to the studio this weekend, to use full studio lighting for the first time in many years and share experience and ideas with a number of colleagues from the Swiss Strobist group.

A gallery of images from my journey to the U.K. and back in 2006, collecting Jo to bring her to live with me in Switzerland.

Jo, photographed on a Sunday outing to the Gurten hilltop park on the outskirts of Bern.

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A re-edited version of a picture from 2008 has been added to the One Frame Movie series.

I learned an important lesson in portrait photography last weekend: that of how ready the subject is to see themselves in an honest and detailed image, when they may be seeing themselves this way for the first time.

It’s been a while since I’ve been in the studio and taken high contrast black and white portraits, so Jo helped me this evening to practice.

Small gallery of photos from a 2005 summer trip to the Piz Gloria revolving mountain-top restaurant above Mürren, made famous by the 1969 James Bond Film “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”.

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Jo and I go sledging in subzero temperatures from Kleine Scheidegg to Grindelwald, along a hairpin 7.5 km route through the forests beneath the north wall of the Eiger.

Posts about Jo

Fifteen years on

On Hound Tor

Camera Obscura

Gwatt nature reserve, Thun

Big old hill

Hike to Steingletscher

Review of 2013

Six (and nine) years on

The Thirteenth Country

Out of the blue

Conquering Catbells

Studio fun

Get Shorty

Waiting for Spring

Float Like A Butterfly

The eye of the beholder

Back in the studio

Proper Sledging