Permanent Tourist

The personal website of Mark Howells-Mead

  • Inspired by Adams

    A small set of black and white landscape photographs, shot on an overcast day in the Lauterbrunnen Valley.

  • I was at the Street Parade dance festival on the streets of Zurich again this past weekend. This first set of photos shows some of the participants of the floats, as they wait patiently to take their position in the parade which leads through the centre of the city.

  • You may recall that I wrote about HDR technique some time ago, and a technique I employed at a wedding last weekend reminded me to write about the alternative: Tone Mapping and Zone System exposure.

  • The second of two photographic portraiture and lighting days this summer will take place at the Rolex Learning Centre on the grounds of the EPFL in Lausanne on Sunday 19th August.

  • Our workshop day this past Sunday was a great success, after the rain passed away from the MFO Park in Oerlikon some ten minutes before we started! Blazing sunshine soon warmed the area and gave us plenty of light to work with, so the day was spent mainly working with a mixture of natural sunlight…

  • Photos from a visit in June 2012

  • Thanks to all of those who toook part in a Doodle survey, the dates have now been set for the first of the on-location lighting and portraiture days here in Switzerland.

  • The beginning of the summer camping season on the Piémançon beaches in the Camargue region of southern France.

  • Studio workshop

    I ran the latest of my photographic workshops last weekend and chose (mainly because of the time of year) to hold it in the studio. Thanks to the ready availability of the studio space at Satzart in Bern, we were able to use the spacious room to cover basic introduction to the Elinchrom equipment and…

  • I like being up high. When we were in Stuttgart at the beginning of October, I could therefore hardly turn up the chance to visit the restaurant at the top of the world’s first concrete television tower. I am a little scared of heights when on man-made structures, but I managed to overcome a wobbly-knees…

  • Jo and I split our journey to Franconia in southern Germany with a stop-over in Stuttgart. As we’d time to kill whilst there, we looked up some of the sights in advance and decided to stop off briefly at one of the centres of German engineering: the Porsche district. Alongside the obligatorily huge showroom of…

  • I was delighted to be invited to submit to the upcoming “Open Show” in Lausanne, an evening of photographic presentation by a small selection of photographers, and honoured to have my submission confirmed earlier today. I’ll be showing twenty photos from my One Frame Movie series next Thursday evening, 18th August, at the Espace Carbu…

  • My all-day coaching session on 11th June 2011 took place in the grounds of the ETH at Hönggerberg in Zurich. I’ve used this location several times before thanks to the size and variety of potential areas in which to take photos; from modern architectural detail to green lawns and trees.

  • A portrait shoot in the Satzart studio in Bern.

  • Details of a new 60cm Walimex softbox I’ve bought for use with my compact flash guns.

  • I decided to take advantage of glorious warm weather and the Easter bank holiday to visit the closed stretch of road near the upper reaches of the Susten pass in Switzerland.

  • Deep in the Jura mountains is a large cave; easily accessible, as it sits alongside the main road which winds its way through the bottom of the Pichoux Gorge. In the cave is a shrine to the Christian St. Columba of Spain.

  • The inevitably named High Bridge near Leuk in the upper reaches of canton Wallis in Switzerland; so named because of the depth of the gorge beneath it.

  • Now that the spring is here once more, I’m looking for volunteers for my photo series “One Frame Movie”.

  • The church of St. Michael, on the private ground of the Didlington Hall estate, west of Swaffham in Norfolk, England.

  • The civic gardens on the lakefront at Lugano surround the Villa Ciani, just a couple of minutes to the east of the city centre.