Aerial photography and video in Exmouth

Exmouth sits where the Exe reaches the sea, and the town is built around that transition: two miles of open seafront running west, a working marina and docks quarter tucked in where the estuary meets the harbour wall, and ground rising steeply behind the town towards Orcombe Point, where the red cliffs mark the start of the Jurassic Coast. Few towns nearby have that much continuous coastline in one place, and it is difficult to photograph from the ground: a beach walk shows one stretch at a time, never the full two miles in a single view.

The housing stock rises in layers up the hillside behind the front: Regency and Victorian villas with sea views on the higher ground, seafront apartment blocks looking straight out over the beach, and inter-war and post-war suburbs at Withycombe Raleigh and Littleham further back. Around the docks, modern waterside development is still going up, apartments and mixed-use blocks built right onto the water's edge in a part of town that looked very different a generation ago.

Estate agents selling a seafront apartment or a villa with a sea view need the coastline itself in the picture, the two miles of beach and the shape of the bay, which a street-level photograph simply cannot include. Developers marketing new waterside apartments around the docks want the same principle applied to a building site: an overhead that shows the marina, the water and the finished or half-built block together, selling the setting as much as the flat.

Sandy Bay, on the edge of town towards Orcombe Point, is a large holiday park, and operators there diversifying into glamping pods, static lodges or event space need images that show the site's position between the cliffs and the sea, not just the accommodation itself. Attractions built around Orcombe Point and the start of the Jurassic Coast Trail have a similar need: the geology and the coastal path are the draw, and an aerial view is the clearest way to show a visitor what the walk actually looks like before they set out on it.

Exmouth is one of the most exposed towns in this part of Devon, with south-westerlies coming in off the sea unbroken across the whole seafront. For photography that is often an advantage rather than a problem: big weather moving in off the Channel makes for dramatic skies and strong contrast over the water, the kind of shot that a calm, flat day over an inland town rarely produces. Flights are planned around wind limits rather than avoided because of them, and a bright, blustery day with fast-moving cloud is frequently the best booking of the week.

Orcombe Point and the cliffs beyond catch low sun particularly well in the early morning and late afternoon, when the red sandstone takes on real colour and the shadows pick out the layering in the rock. That golden light window is short, especially in winter, so timing a shoot around it is worth planning for.