Clifton Arms Wedding Photographer

Why we love photographing at Clifton Arms

If you have booked the Clifton Arms and you want a wedding photographer who knows Lytham front, this page is for you. The Clifton Arms is the red-brick hotel on West Beach, Grade II listed and built in 1839 to 1840, with the big bay windows facing south over Lytham Green to the Ribble estuary. It has 48 bedrooms, a ceremony room in the Clifton Suite, the Talbot Suite and the Library for smaller rooms, and a Ballroom that takes 80 to 148 for the wedding breakfast and the evening. Lytham town centre is a two-minute walk behind it.

What makes Clifton Arms wedding photography different from any other hotel is what is outside the front door. The Green is right there, the estuary beyond it, and the windmill is 600 metres east along the front, a ten-minute walk in a dress. The old wooden jetty sits near the windmill, and Lowther Gardens is a few minutes the other way. You do not need a car and you do not need to leave your guests for long. We can get you to the windmill and back in twenty-five minutes with the photographs done.

We are Lee and Dom, two photographers from Poulton-le-Fylde, and you get both of us at every wedding. One of us stays with the guests on the Green while the other walks you along the front. Prices start at £599 for a Half Day, which covers a Clifton Suite ceremony, the drinks and the walk to the windmill, and the Full Day runs on through the speeches in the Ballroom to the first dance.

A fair warning on the weather. The Green is open to the estuary and it is windy, more often than not. Hold the veil, bring a coat for the walk, and let us do the sunset from the hotel steps if the front is blowing a gale. The sun goes down over the water to the west, in front of the hotel, so the evening light is on your side whichever way the wind is.

Light and timing

This is a hotel with the sea on three sides of the view, so the light is big and changes fast. The front rooms, the Clifton Suite and the Ballroom’s windows face south over the Green, which means strong light through the bays in the middle of the day and soft, even light later on. For the ceremony we use the window as a side light and no flash. The Ballroom at night is a warm room with low lighting, and we set up two off-camera flashes for the speeches and the first dance so faces are clean and the room still looks like itself. Outside, the estuary acts as a huge reflector: even on an overcast day the Green is bright and the skies are wide, and on a clear evening the sun goes down over the water in front of you. The wind is the real issue, not the light; we carry a clamp light and a reflector but mostly we use the hotel front as a windbreak and keep the walks short. On a wet day the bays, the Library and the hotel staircase give us enough inside, and the Green is thirty seconds from the door the minute it stops.

Drone

The Clifton Arms is about a kilometre outside the Blackpool Airport flight restriction zone and about the same outside Warton’s, so the hotel itself is not in either circle. The catch is Warton’s runway protection strip, which runs out over the estuary and clips the shore near the jetty, just south of the Green. So the launch spot matters: we fly from the Green side of the hotel, not from the beach, and we ask Warton air traffic control beforehand so there is no doubt. The hotel, the Green and the windmill from above are a good set and we price them as an add-on at £149 with photography, refunded if the wind or the airspace stops us. Lytham front at 50 metres from the public is also a busy place on a summer Saturday, so this is one we plan rather than wing. More on our drone page.