They say England isn't sunny... And it's generally not. In fact as I write this I'm wrapped in an electric blanket. But! When it is, there are enough places you can go that will make you feel like it really is a green and pleasant land, and not a grey, milquetoast one. My choice? It's Hampstead Heath.

This walk starts to the east of the Heath on Parliament Hill Fields, and then essentially runs anticlockwise around the boundaries of the Heath. Kenwood House is omitted as it's run by English Heritage and they prohibit professional photography. I'm not a pro, but regrettably I had to leave it out for this reason, because sometimes people see a big camera and assume you're getting paid (I'm not). But we do visit plenty of other places, including an incursion into Golders Hill to visit the Pergola, a gorgeous outdoor covered garden where I take people who moan about how built up and miserable London is (it isn't)!

After the Pergola, we visit the Vale of Health, passing the amphibian crossing on the long journey to Parliament Hill. I was absolutely pooped by the end of it, but the view was worth it, and, despite some technical issues I discuss below, I'm broadly happy with this video. I hope you enjoy this small slice of what little summer we had this year.

🎥 Filmed on Panasonic GH5S using a DJI RS3 Mini.
📅 Recorded June 2024.
🌡️ Temperature 28C. It was sunny all day. Too hot!!

Locations featured:
00:00 Intro
00:20 Lower Parliament Hill Fields near Stone of Free Speech
13:21 Highgate Ponds
25:41 Stock Pond Bridge
26:39 South Meadow
33:00 Springett's Wood
46:07 Fairground Site Path
51:12 Spaniard's Road
53:08 Judge's Walk
55:18 West Heath
59:25 The Hill Garden and Pergola
1:33:45 West Heath Pt II
01:50:19 Vale of Health
02:00:00 Vale of Health Pond
02:02:54 East Heath
02:14:30 Bird Bridge Viaduct over Viaduct Pond
02:16:26 East Heath Pt II
02:20:18 Upper Parliament Hill Fields
02:29:37 Parliament Hill
02:31:40 Outro

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Postscript: I've wanted to record this video since I started using the GH5 (now GH5S) as it felt totally achievable and I could get a bit more out of the footage than I did the DJI Pocket. The goal was to get the 'perfect' Hampstead Heath video. It's definitely a video for me; park videos do terribly, as do long videos, as YouTube cares a lot about watch percentage and no mass of people will watch two and a half hours of me walking in one sitting (if anyone does at all!).

It ended up being a lot harder than I thought it would be and I made a lot of mistakes, though: obviously a gimbal and mirrorless camera is much heavier than the setup I ran previously which was a DJI pocket on a stick. There was a fiber of some sort on the sensor of the GH5S which is why there's a mark that looks like part of the digit 0 at the top right of the sunniest frames; while I clean my lenses regularly, I don't really touch the sensor! I also pushed the lens in a bit while cleaning it at XX:XX; you will probably notice that it's slightly zoomed in for the rest of the video. So basically: I'm an idiot, and this isn't perfect. I don't know if I'll ever go back, but if I do, probably not for a few years.

Editing took a long time (which is why I didn't post it for two months) because I wanted to blur out people in bikinis and swimwear as much as was practical. I did this for both sexes, because while people might sign up to go to the park in their swim shorts, they're not consenting to having that memorialised on a hi-def video. Some of the blurs and tracking are a bit lazy and unsightly, but I'd rather a slightly aesthetically ugly video than a video that was morally a little ugly.

I know some people use the hottest girl in the video on thumbnails, and it's probably "smart" in terms of getting views and subs, but it doesn't feel right to me at all and I don't really want to ever field any suggestions that I'm ogling people (or attracting people who are into that). AI etc is becoming a bit more common, too, and I don't know if anyone will crawl these videos for training data one day. Again, not super sure people want their bikini visage rolled into that.

As ever, my contact details are in the about section of my profile if you want to reach out re: privacy, blur requests, etc. It's a long video, and exceptionally time consuming to meaningfully QA, so I might have / probably have missed something.