Blog posts about Niesen at Permanent Tourist

Re-photographing the Bernese Alps from a viewpoint I found last year.

Thunersee and Brienzersee – Pure Switzerland

The region I’ve been calling home for sixteen years.

Watch video

A spring-like day and an afternoon stroll around a little village on the shore of Lake Brienz.

View gallery

The shore of Lake Thun at Gwatt is a great place to photograph the sunrise and the sunset.

The Niesen casts a clearly triangular shadow when the sun is low in the sky.

Dense, grey fog on the lakes in the Bernese Oberland means that it’s best to head for the surrounding hills and mountains to get above the cloud and into the sunshine. We took a drive up a road we’d never used before – an unrestricted, toll-free one for a change – and ended up high […]

Evening light on the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau

We are ever grateful for the opportunity to live in such a beautiful country. For the luck which means that we are of sufficient means to decide, based on a weather forecast, to drive for fifteen minutes and ascend in a rattling funicular cabin to a place which feels like the top of the world. All to […]

In search of a bench with a view, we find a meadow with a view instead.

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.

The triangular Niesen towers over the Lower Simmen Valley and the towns of Spiez and Faulensee, on the shores of Lake Thun in Switzerland. The glowing clouds behind the mountains in the distance aren’t illuminated by towns, but by lightning storms above (respectively) Lenk and Gruyères.

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 […]

The Seenachtsfest took place last weekend in Spiez, so Jo and I headed up with our friend Beat to the vineyards near our home, where there is a commanding view across the castle, lake and surrounding mountains.

View gallery

The Niesen is a mountain, located in the Bernese Oberland region of the Swiss Alps, overlooking the lake of Thun and is often called the Swiss Pyramid. The summit of the mountain (2362 meters) can be reached easily with a funicular from Mülenen (near Reichenbach). The construction of the Niesenbahn funicular was completed in 1910. […]

View gallery

This is a rapidly conceived and executed shot, as a big storm headed in from the Simmen valley from western Switzerland. I saw the distant clouds being illuminated by lightning (which accounts for the varied colouring in the clouds) so I grabbed a tripod and framed my shot from our living room window, setting exposure […]

I am inspired once more to pull my finger out and start putting photographic books together. One of them will be a series of shots of the Niesen, which I see as this view every day from our sitting room window.

It’s been a long time coming, but Spring is here. Beautiful weather this past weekend, so it’ll soon be time once more to travel to Thun by ship for shopping trip, and time to dust off the camera to capture summer sunshine.