Malvern Hills Cloud Inversion with a Pentax Q7

Over the Christmas break, we had a series of maybe 5 days of fog. It was that proper fog that just doesn’t seem to go away throughout the day and after a while starts to feel a little eerie. We were particularly busy over the first few days – I think it might have actually been over Xmas day and a few days after – but eventually we found a day to go out for a walk in it. I wanted to see if we could find our way above it, so we decided to go for a walk on the Malvern hills.

The Malverns aren’t really all that tall relative to a lot of ranges of hills or mountains, but they are the nearest to us, so were the obvious choice. I wasn’t really thinking of it as a photographic outing – it was more a day out with the girls and dog. As such, I decided to just take the Pentax Q7. I’m still loving this camera for these sorts of outings. It manages to sit perfectly in my mind as a “proper” camera that gives me serious creative control and freedoms, yet at the same time it’s tiny. I’ve taken to carrying it with the 8.5mm (40mm ish equivalent) and 15-45mm (70-200 equivalent). I don’t use the longer lens much, but it’s a great resource and is surprisingly good quality for its tiny size.

We started the walk at the clock tower in north Malvern and made our way up towards the paths around North Hill. I was pretty happy snapping away in the mist. Like most people I think, I do like taking photos in these sorts of conditions – especially in this sort of environment.

I must admit, I was expecting the fog to clear quite soon as we walked up, but it was still pretty dense even when we got to the main path that circles the hill. In fact, we pretty much came to terms with the idea that this was just going to be a misty walk. The view is amazing from up there, but we’ve seen it many times, so it wasn’t a big deal to not be able to see it.

We carried on the walk toward the Beacon (the highest hill) regardless. As we circled around the south of north hill we started to see a few more glimpses of sunshine and blue sky. And then, all of a sudden the fog cleared a bit and we could see both the top of the beacon and sugar loaf hill poking out.

The angle of the light and position of the fog relative to us made the view of Sugar Loaf really quite unusual. This is, of course, where having a tiny 70-200 equivalent lens in your pocket comes in handy.

From here we walked the rest of the way around North Hill, back into the fog, past Sugar Loaf and started the walk up to the top of the Beacon. As we were walking up, we couldn’t actually see the top of the fog, it seemed to get slightly thinner, and then all of a sudden we just emerged out of the top of it.

I was recently chatting to Scott Ferguson (a new contributor to the website) via email. He made a comment about being in a moment when he found himself not able to take a bad photo. He commented that this was a rare but very enjoyable feeling. I sent him a link to these saying I could completely empathise. It’s not that I’m saying my photos are incredibly good, just that what I was photographing was incredible so it felt hard to take a bad shot. To top it off, we got to the top just in time for sunset.

After a few more shots we decided to walk back down the hill – it was going to start getting dark so we knew we needed to be making tracks. Unfortunately, it was as we started walking down that my daughter dropped her phone smashing the screen in the process. This alone would have taken the shine off the day, but I then followed her phone-smashing by falling over and smashing my rib cage into my asthma inhaler that was in my inside coat pocket. I think I just bruised it, but more than six weeks later I’m still feeling twinges. Still, the phone was fixed, and the ribs will heal. What will remain are the memories and a set of photos that I’m really quite pleased with!

I also think this is a really good example of that annoyingly hackneyed phrase, ‘the best camera is the one you have with you’. I saw a guy up there with a massive Canon camera and apparently a bag of lenses. I am sure he got some objectively “better” photos that could be printed much bigger/viewed closer… but my camera fit easily in my pocket, is usable one handed (which is useful when you have a big excitable dog), and got me some results that I am more than happy with!

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