"Home is..." near Bridgenorth

After a little gap in proceedings caused by the appalling weather recently, we're back to shooting pictures for the "Home is..." project.  Whilst its all well and good rolling up to some deserted hillside or beach at daft-o-clock in the morning in the summer to get a shot in an empty location, there are some places which would be perfect to shoot in, where you need to ask permission.

 

This leads us to this location, Eardington, on the Severn Valley Railway.  We spotted this station on the way back from the recce at Christmas, around the Country Park.  We decided it offered some decent backdrops for the project, wrote off to the Severn Valley, and they kindly agreed to let us come and use the location.

 

The location in question is Eardington Station, just south of Bridgenorth.  In the early days of the SVR it was a public station, but its closeness to Bridgenorth means it is now closed to the public and is used just by the engineering staff.  For us, that means a well-kept platform and buildings, parked train of goods wagons, no public to stroll into the shots, and because the railway is closed to the public at the moment, no chance of being run over whilst taking pictures.

The site gave us three suitable, distinctive backgrounds in the end, which was fantastic as we've been trying for a railway-themed shot since the summer, without success. 

 

This is Steve, who basically gave us free reign of the site for the morning, provided us with cups of tea (an essential feature of location shoots), and was an all-round good chap with us.  We even got him to model for one of the shots, which was very good of him.  A word of thanks also to Phil, the first person we spoke to at Bewdley (the main offices for the railway) who helped arrange all this and made our visit possible in the first place.

 

 

We did two of the chair pics at the site, and also the first of the different room sets, in this case a hobby room (model railway), which will be followed by similar set-ups elsewhere shortly.  We've been building other sets, portable bedroom, office, etc to use, and these will crop up in blog postings shortly.  There's going to be more about the above set in a separate post on the model-making blog shortly.

 

We ended up being very lucky with the weather- having travelled down on the Friday in torrential rain, we got about four hours of beautiful blue skies and sunshine to do the shoot; within a couple of hours of us packing up, the midlands was hit by a thunderstorm with hail, rain, the full works.

 

So a big thanks to Steve, Phil, and the Severn Valley Railway for letting us shoot the pics at Eardington, and letting us work at such a fantastic location.  Coming soon, with luck, Ribblehead and the Pennines...