Aerial photography and video in Newton Abbot

Newton Abbot sits differently to the steep estuary towns nearby: it is built on the flat floodplain where the Teign becomes tidal, ringed by hills, with the ornate Victorian railway-era town centre and its large stock of terraces at the middle of it. The town's shape from above is not a single dramatic climb but a spread, and that spread is where most of the interesting activity now is.

Substantial modern development at Houghton Barton and Wolborough, alongside extensive post-war estates, means Newton Abbot is one of the fastest-changing towns in this part of Devon. New streets, new junctions and new green space appear year on year, and none of that growth is easy to show from a camera held at head height on site.

To the north-west, the Bovey basin's clay workings have shaped this part of Teignbridge for generations, and Newton Abbot's position between Exeter, Torquay, Teignmouth and Dawlish makes it a natural hub for a photographer covering several coastal and inland bookings from one base in a single day.

Developers marketing a new housing scheme need aerial photography more than almost any other local buyer: a single image showing plot layout, road access, proximity to the town centre and how a development sits against the surrounding countryside does the work that a brochure full of ground-level render shots cannot. Progress photography through a build, taken from the same angle at each stage, is its own useful record for a developer as much as a marketing asset.

Newton Abbot Racecourse is a second, quite different local buyer: a large venue that reads best from above, showing the course, the stands and the scale of a race day in a single frame. Stover Country Park and the Teign estuary give walking, leisure and nature attractions in the area a similar opportunity, and hotels near the racecourse or the estuary can use the same kind of imagery to show their setting.

The contrast between the ornate Victorian railway-era streets at the centre of town and the newer estates on its edges is itself worth showing: two very different kinds of housing stock a few minutes' flight apart, useful for anyone marketing the town as a whole rather than a single development.

Newton Abbot is low-lying and often misty off the Teign, which mostly matters here for timing rather than access: a clear morning after mist has lifted gives sharp, well-lit shots of the estuary and the town, while flying straight into low winter mist wastes a booking. The town is less wind-exposed than the coastal towns nearby, though the estuary can funnel a stiff easterly through in winter.

The former Great Western railway works, part of the town's identity for well over a century, sits alongside the newer development as a reminder that Newton Abbot has reinvented its built environment before, and its current wave of new housing is simply the latest version of that.

A racecourse operating on flat land beside the town is unusual for Devon, where ground of that size is rare, and race days bring exactly the kind of scale and movement that a static ground photograph cannot show. Stover Country Park's lake and woodland sit close enough to the newer estates at Wolborough that a single flight can cover a housing development and the green space marketed alongside it in the same session.