Sunday 27th July 2014 saw a momentous event - the (partial) demolition of one of the characteristic landmarks of South Oxfordshire - Didcot Power Station.
Or rather, three of the huge 325 ft high cooling towers.

Didcot Power Station actually comprised two power stations, Didcot "A", which was coal/biomass/gas fired, and Didcot "B" which is wholly gas fired.
Didcot "A" came to the end of its useful life last year and was switched off, awaiting decommissioning, which began on 27th July 2014 with the blow-down of
three of the cooling towers. This was scheduled to happen between 3 am and 6 am, much to the dismay of we locals who wished to witness this momentous event.
Safety was the reason given for the unsociable timing.

Much of the immediate vicinity of the power station would be closed to the public, so earlier, on the Saturday, I drove around the power station looking for a
suitable location with a good view of the cooling towers, and identified a spot some 2.4 miles away (as the crow flies). Then, at about 3.30 am, I got my camera,
a large lens and my tripod and drove to that spot, to find about a million people already there! (Well, not quite a million, but certainly many hundreds.)

I found a reasonable spot squeezed in between someone’s car and the hedge, set up my camera on the tripod, and waited. And waited... And waited... Eventually,
at 5 o’clock in the morning, there was a bang (the warning alarm that the blow-down was about to begin), then a few seconds later the towers began to sink slowly
to the ground behind the houses. The actual report of the explosives going off was quite muffled, and followed on a few seconds later.
It was all over in about 10 seconds.

Sunrise was at 5:17 am that morning, so the light was pretty dire, forcing me to crank the ISO up to 4000 in order to get anything like a high enough shutter speed.
Even then, the images were not good. I had dialed in -0.7 EV compensation to keep the shutter speed as high as possible, which was probably a mistake, as I had to
push the exposure up in ACR, resulting in very noisy images. I thought they looked a tad better in monochrome. The colours, at that time in the morning,
before sunrise, were not good.

So, I present here some images as a record of the passing of this (not) much-loved landmark of South Oxfordshire. Also included are some before and after images
taken under more photo-friendly conditions.