Ben's Photo Blog: The night the River Nene almost flooded in Sutton Bridge, 5th December 2013.

So as you may know we came very close to flooding here in Sutton Bridge, Lincolnshire, unlike surrounding areas such as Kings Lynn that did suffer from an unwanted bath that night.

I got a text from my mum that afternoon saying that she'd received a call from an automated line issuing a tidal surge warning. Safe to say that was a paranoid afternoon at work.

I biked home from work about 5pm and yeah the river was pretty high, which added to the paranoia. Laura and I were going out for a curry that night and we'd decided to carry on with our plans.

After a shower and putting my best suit, okay I lied, shirt and jeans on, I had half hour to go and look at the impending doom.

It was 7pm and high tide was due until 7.30 - 8pm.

I walked up to the river and was struck with the thought 'yeah that's pretty high!'.

It was quite the popular attraction as there were people coming and going all over, car horns sounding and cars turning round and queueing down the small streets near the river bank. I've seen videos on the net that people took of lorries trying to turn round, I think some found this quite amusing.

I decided not to take my tripod as 1, I didn't really time have to set it up, as we were going out for 7.30 and 2, which I was glad I didn't, there were people everywhere so there wasn't a lot of room for such a set up.

I had my flash gun in my pocket and a camera that's capable of shooting up to an ISO of 102400. So I set the ISO at 2000, set the shutter speed ranging around 1/20 to 1/80 and apertures around f5.6 to f8 and balanced the ambient light available with flash.

The shots did have some noise present, this is to be expected from shooting in the dark at such an ISO but with a small amount of noise reduction the images were very usable.

Im loving black and white more and more at the moment and Im not a fan of the colour of street lamps so it was a sure thing that these shots were being converted to black and white. Personally I think the dark areas with the shape of the bridge and light reflections work really well, do you agree?

As it was dark, shooting hand held and having only limited time I fired off numerous shots of the same scenes knowing that one would be ok to use. This made the task of editing annoying because I had loads of very similar usable shots so in the end I just deleted the rest without much care because there really were no differences between each shot.

I always try to shoot like Im shooting film and only take shots that count but I did get great satisfaction from the look on peoples face when my shutter fired continuously and the flash was going off like it was a rave.

I went home and out at 7.30pm and was told by people who went for a look around 8pm that the water level had got even higher and so the Cross keys Bridge was closed for a short time causing tail backs on the A17.

Here's to the fact the river never flooded at Sutton Bridge as I live very close to the river as the crow flies. Although others in local towns did not fare so well, for those lets hope things are returning to normal.

On to the shots.