Aerial photography and video in Dartmouth

Dartmouth is built on ground so steep that some of its streets give up and become steps. The old town, tight against the west bank of the Dart, is packed with timber-framed and jettied merchant houses around Bayards Cove and the Butterwalk, one of the best-preserved runs of historic waterfront building in Devon, with Georgian and Victorian terraces climbing the hill behind it. From above, the relationship between the water, the quay and that stacked hillside becomes obvious in a way it never quite does from the street.

Above the old town, the Britannia Royal Naval College sits on the hillside like a second landmark, a large Edwardian institutional building looking down over the roofs of the merchant houses to the river. Very few Devon towns have two structures of that scale and character within one frame, and an aerial shot is the only way to hold both in view together.

Dartmouth's status as a deep-water port, rather than a shallow estuary harbour like some of its neighbours, is part of what gives the river its working character: larger vessels, a lower car ferry crossing near the river mouth, and a steady coming and going that reads clearly from above even when the streets themselves are quiet.

Dartmouth's river mouth, guarded by the castle, and its steady traffic of sailing boats and the lower ferry crossing the Dart, give hotels and holiday-let operators along the waterfront a setting that ground photography struggles to convey. A picture of a hotel from its own car park says little about what makes Dartmouth worth staying in; a picture from above, with the castle, the river mouth and the moorings in shot, says all of it.

Estate agents selling the merchant houses and Georgian terraces are selling position on the hill as much as the building itself, and wedding and event venues along the river benefit from imagery that shows a setting on the water rather than just a room. Dartmouth's sailing and naval calendar also brings boat traffic on the river worth photographing for operators and event organisers who want to show the town at its busiest.

Guest houses and B&Bs in the Georgian terraces on the hill are a smaller but steady source of bookings too, since a room with a view over the Dart is exactly what a listing needs to show, and that view only exists from above the roofline opposite.

The steep, stacked layout that makes Dartmouth so photogenic from above also makes it one of the harder towns in the South Hams to shoot well from the ground, since most viewpoints only take in one street or one building at a time. That is the case for booking an aerial shoot here, rather than anything about the buildings themselves.

Dartmouth sits close enough to Kingsbridge and Salcombe that a booking here is often combined with a shoot further along the coast on the same trip, covering the mouth of the Dart and the mouth of the Kingsbridge estuary within a single day.

Because Dartmouth is sheltered by the shape of the river mouth rather than fully exposed, low winter light lasts longer here across a shoot than it does on the open coast at Brixham or further round the bay, giving a slightly wider working window on a bright winter afternoon.