Martina Bisaz’s Switzerland: Alpine Lakes, an Orange VW Bus and Photo Tips

Turquoise lakes under frosted trees, an orange VW bus on a mountain pass, the Matterhorn glowing pink in a tiny pool: these photographs of Switzerland are by Martina Bisaz, the Swiss photographer known on Instagram as @kitkat_ch, and a friend of Snow Addiction.

Martina Bisaz: from Graubünden to Instagram

Bisaz was born and raised in the canton of Graubünden (Grisons), the mountainous south-east corner of Switzerland, and still spends many weekends at her parents’ home in what she calls “the most beautiful mountain village of Switzerland”. She moved to Zürich to study architecture, then switched to the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in scientific visualisation and went on to work as a scientific illustrator, including for the archaeology department of the University of Zürich.

Photography began as a small part of her studies. The big change, she told The Woolf in a 2015 interview, came with Instagram: her early posts of her vintage Fiat 500 drew followers, Instagram featured her account, and her audience reached nearly 130,000 that year and later above 211,000. In 2017 she left illustration to work as a freelance photographer.

Road trips in an orange VW bus

Bisaz travels Switzerland in her Fiat 500 and an orange Volkswagen bus, and the van has become a signature of her feed: bright orange against grey rock, dark tarmac and snow. One outing, she says, can produce enough pictures to post for a month, so the steady stream of mountain views comes from a few well-planned trips, not a new pass every day.

She prefers summer and autumn, when the light is better and the high country is easier to reach on foot, and her favourite moments include mountain lakes at dawn and, further afield, Santorini at sunset.

Alpine lake reflections and autumn colour

Reflections run through the whole series. In her landscape tips for ifolor, Bisaz explains that lakes are usually calmest before sunrise, which is when they give the cleanest mirror images, and that placing the horizon in the middle of the frame makes a reflection look symmetrical. She suggests spending the night in a tent or an SAC mountain hut so you are already in place at dawn.

The Matterhorn shot shows why patience matters. She has travelled to the mountain three times and seen it clear only once; the other visits ended in cloud.

Landscape photography tips from Martina Bisaz

• Shoot early and late: sunrise and sunset give softer shadows than midday.
• Add a foreground: a near object, like the pocket watch held over the valley or red flowers in front of a village, creates depth.
• Use guiding lines: roads, ridges and valleys lead the eye into the frame.
• Choose the aperture: around f/10 or higher keeps everything sharp; f/4 or wider blurs the foreground.
• Shoot RAW with a tripod: RAW lets you fix white balance later, and a tripod is essential at twilight; a wall and a few stones will do in a pinch.
• Welcome bad weather: fog, mist, snow and sun breaking through after rain are more atmospheric than a flat blue sky.
• Go back: revisit the same spot in different seasons and light.

Find a safe spot on an established path for that foreground, and stay off fragile lakeshores. For more Swiss mountain settings, explore Gimmelwald and its Alpine surroundings or our Oeschinensee summer toboggan guide.

See more of her work on Instagram at @kitkat_ch, on martinabisaz.ch and in the Bored Panda gallery of her work.

Related reading

• Karol Nienartowicz’s Mountain Tents: Six Years of Camps and Landscapes
• The Cambrian in Adelboden: Mountain Views, Spa Time and a Better-Planned Stay
• Lauterbrunnen: Waterfalls, Cliffs and Valley Life
• Bern in Winter: Old-Town Walks, Seasonal Lights and Time Indoors

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