I can’t actually remember how Samantha and I came to the idea of doing a shoot at the Devon Railway Centre. It might even have been that we intended to go to Bickleigh Mill, and then changed our minds on a whim – they’re right next to each other.

It’s not cheap to get in, but there’s quite a bit in there, and your train rides around the site are all free. And it gave us some railway lines where we could be pretty sure of safety – the train looped around quite slowly, I think once every half an hour, so we hopped off when we saw a good bit of track, and knew we had half an hour until there would be a train along again.

Also, they’re smol trains. I’m pretty sure it would still hurt to be hit by one, but its stopping distance is probably a bit shorter than a full-sized train.

We did a few photos around the grounds generally, too.

Samantha had talked about wanting to do a shoot at a funfair, and there was one in Tiverton at the time, so that was the next stop – that had been the main plan for the shoot, really, the railway centre was just a little bonus on the way from Exeter to Tiverton.

So we made full use of the colourful lights, and even got the Lensbaby out for some shots.

We tried one more location, but it didn’t really work out as well as I’d hoped. I’d found a set of ponds or lakes near Dart’s Farm that looked interesting. Looks like they’re set up for fishing. We parked up there and had a walk to the ponds, and we did get a few photos, but it wasn’t an inspiring location. But Samantha did a quick change and we got a few interesting shots anyway.