AS Clive Haynes clung to a ladder spanning an open trapdoor high in the bell tower of Worcester Cathedral, he was well aware he was closer than comfortable to meeting his Maker.

One slip and he would plummet 150ft down three storeys to the flagstone floor below, where he would land as flat as an offertory plate.

His only consolation, if there was one, was that the House of God would be as good a place as any to go. It would probably have a lift rather than a stairway to Heaven.

Fortunately, Clive hung on for dear life that day and took an amazing downward looking image that remains one of his favourites among the many thousand he has taken during a career as one of the leading names in the world of Worcestershire photographers.

An exhibition of some of the best of Clive Haynes will feature in the second Ludlow Photographic Festival to be held at the Ludlow Assembly Rooms in September.

Called ‘Second Chance’, it will be in the sallery on the fifth level and will explore the more creative aspects of digital photography.

In fact, Worcester Cathedral can take credit as the place where it really all began, long before digital was a speck on the photographic horizon. Clive’s father, by profession a skilled toolmaker, was a keen amateur photographer with his own dark room and bought his two sons, Clive and Malcolm, Box Brownie cameras to get started.

By the early 1960s the bug had bitten and the brothers invested their own money in a pair of new Praktica V SLR cameras.

“They were a major outlay for us,” said Clive, “and we were looking for a really good location to try them out.

“It was a nice day and so we decided to climb the tower of the cathedral to get some panoramic shots across Worcester.”

As luck – although that’s not quite the right word – would have it, the city was in the process of probably the largest reconstruction programme in its history.

The scheme in the Lychgate area at the cathedral end of High Street attracted a lot of criticism, some of it even national, as quaint but rickety old buildings were flattened in the name of progress.

It became tagged ‘the sack of Worcester’ and Clive and Malcolm rapidly realised they were in at the start of something big. We were lucky enough to be able to take photographs as the buildings came down and then over the years record the new ones going up,” said Clive.

“It was a stroke of luck really we decided to go up the cathedral tower that day. We could have gone to the Malvern Hills.”

The images the brothers took of this controversial project fired their interest in local history through photographs and led to their audio visual show, the Changing Face of Worcester.

It enthralled audiences for more than 30 years as it took them on a journey of the city’s past from the earliest beginnings to the present day. Eventually there was even a video and several books.

There was also an audio visual show called Worcester Cathedral in Focus, which homed in on one of Clive’s favourite and most photographed buildings in the city.

“I’m always looking for something different or an unusual angle,” he said. “Especially for a place like the cathedral, which has been there so long and photographed so often.

“I had this idea for a shot taken from the bell chamber (the room right at the top of the cathedral, where the bells hang) looking down the tower.

“It’s on the third storey, but there are three pairs of trap doors all in line and if you open them, you can see right down to the ground. It must be at least a 150ft drop.

“If I leaned over from the side, I couldn’t get a clean shot straight down, so we laid a ladder across the gap and I crawled on to it.

“Then I was able to shoot straight down while trying to make sure I didn’t fall off. To give some sense of scale, we asked two vergers to stand at the bottom.

“However, I was so thrilled with the photographs, I forgot all about them and it was about 15 minutes before I realised they were still standing there and told them we had finished and they could move.”

If he’d slipped off the ladder and landed on their heads, they’d have found out a lot earlier.

Another very innovative photoshoot connected to the cathedral AV show involved Europe’s tallest cherrypicker.

Contractors were using the hydraulic platform to access parts of the outside of the building when Clive asked if he could borrow it.

The workmen then launched him more than 200ft into the air, way above the top of the tower, to take a series of aerial photographs.

“It looks as though I’m in a helicopter, but I wasn’t,” he said.

“People often wonder how I got those shots.”

Never mind watch the birdie – he was up there with them.

􀁥 Another Worcester photographer is also taking part in Ludlow Photographic Festival, which runs throughout September.

Michael Hallett, who lives in Henwick Road , will be giving a talk on Tuesday, September 25, about his recent book Olympic Coast based on his photographs of the area around Weymouth, which was host to the Olympic sailing events.

Mr Hallett was born in Portland and bought up in Weymouth.