Ribby Hall Wedding Photographer

Why we love photographing at Ribby Hall

If you have booked Ribby Hall Village and you are choosing a wedding photographer, this page is how we would photograph your day there. We are Lee and Dom, two photographers from Poulton-le-Fylde, up the road on the other side of the M55. Ribby Hall is a holiday village of over 100 acres on Ribby Road, between Wrea Green and Kirkham, about seven miles east of Blackpool. The Harrison family started it in 1995 and still run it. For a wedding that means something that most country houses cannot offer: four different wedding suites, an outdoor ceremony spot, an adults-only Spa Hotel for the two of you and self-catering cottages for everyone else, all on one site with free parking.

The suites are the thing to get your head round. The Garden Room looks over the gardens and takes 130 for the ceremony and 110 for the breakfast. The Rowan has its own bar and dance floor, takes 180 and can be split into three rooms. The Woodland is the big one, 350 for the ceremony, the breakfast and the evening, with a stage, its own entrance and a patio. The Summer House is the outdoor option, licensed for 130 in the gardens among the trees and the flower beds, with an indoor room always kept back in case of rain. Each suite has its own entrance and its own outside space, so if there is a second wedding on the village that day you are unlikely to cross paths.

Ribby Hall wedding photography is mostly about the gardens and the grounds, because the suites themselves are function rooms and you dress them. The landscaped beds round the Summer House, the mature trees, the Woodland Trail with its line of oaks, the Village Garden and the Spa Hotel are the backdrops the village itself recommends, and they are spread out, so we plan where we are going before the day rather than wandering.

You get both of us at every wedding. Our Full Day is £1,049 in the week and covers the Balcony Suite in the morning through to the first dance, and the Half Day from £599 suits a Summer House ceremony and the drinks. Travel is on the standard terms on the prices page.

Light and timing

The grounds give you open shade almost everywhere, because the trees are mature and the beds are planted round them, and that is easy light to photograph in. The one place to be careful is the Summer House at midday in summer: a ceremony out in the open at one o’clock means hard sun and squinting, so we ask where the sun will be at your ceremony time and stand so it is behind or beside you, and we use a reflector for the close shots. Later in the afternoon the trees take the edge off it. Inside, the Garden Room is the bright one, with window light from the gardens that we use on its own. The Rowan and the Woodland are large rooms with their own lighting, so for the speeches and the dancing we set up off-camera flash, bounced where there is a ceiling to bounce from, so faces are clean and the room keeps its colour. On a wet day the village keeps an indoor room back for the ceremony, and the covered areas and the Spa Hotel give us what we need for the couple photographs without anyone getting soaked. We bring the lights every time at Ribby Hall; the suites are built for parties, not for daylight.

Drone

Ribby Hall Village is inside the flight restriction zone for BAE Systems Warton, the aerodrome about 3.8 km to the south. That means no drone flight without Warton’s say-so, and we ask air traffic control there ourselves before the day. Permission is not guaranteed, which is why the drone is an optional add-on at £149 with photography, refunded if Warton says no or the weather stops us. The village from above, with the lawns, the trees and the Spa Hotel, is a good reason to ask. We keep 50 metres from your guests and from the holiday village’s other visitors, which on a busy site means choosing the spot. More on our drone page.