Our deputy picture editor Richard Cave takes his pick of the week’s best photographs and tells us why he reckons they make the grade

 

I’ve always been a big fan of cooling towers, not least because my father spent his working life as an engineer building them, and touring us around the splendid results. This is a great, if ominous image of the beautiful structures at Didcot as diggers lay in wait like threatening dinosaurs preparing to do their worst two days before the demolition. Marvellously framed shot from Neil Braggins.

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 Here’s a picture which never ran in our paper but should be included now, if only because our second man on the scene Ed Nix waited on a nearby bridge from 1am on Sunday morning for the 15 seconds of rapid shutter action.

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Damian Halliwell covered the Commonwealth Games for us up in Glasgow, and got many great pictures. Here is just one, local man Lawrence Clarke finishing second in the 110 metre hurdles to win his place in the finals. Sadly he finished last in the final.

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When I was a punk, a common rallying cry was a call to “Kill all Hippies”. Well here is one who clearly got away, and frankly, with hindsight, and the passage of years since I had enough hair to fashion a mohican, I’m really glad.  Mark Hemsworth’s picture of this fine looking individual staying cool with the aid of ice cream at the Riverside Festival would have never made it into my spread otherwise.

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“United in Grief” ran our front page headline in last Saturday’s Oxford Mail. A poignant set of photos as Mehfooz Akhtar, left, mother of Anum and Majid Khan who were killed in a fire, embraces Samantha Shrewsbury, mother of murder victim Jayden Parkinson, outside Oxford Crown Court.

It was our eagle-eyed snapper Damian Halliwell who spotted this touching moment as sentencing for their children’s respective killers, Fiaz Munshi and Ben Blakeley was on the same day.

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Getting into the thick of the action with a wide angle lens is what hard news photography is all about in my opinion. Jon Lewis did a fine and fearless job as anti fascists clashed with so-called National Front marchers in Oxford last weekend.

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Always check there is a healthy sea of hands before launching into a stage dive. That should come in at around number one in my (non existent) list of clever things to remember when performing live. A great “crashed rock star” shot from Simon Williams as Luke Wride, from Nudy Bronque, hits the turf at the annual Drayton Pub Music Festival.

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