Wedding Photographer Wales — Snowdonia, the Brecon Beacons, Pembrokeshire Coast and the Gower
Wales is one of Britain’s great landscape nations for destination wedding photography — a country of three national parks (Snowdonia, Brecon Beacons and Pembrokeshire Coast), five Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (including the Gower, the first AONB designated in the United Kingdom) and a coastline of 870 miles whose extraordinary range from the North Wales mountains’ glaciated lake cwms and the Lleyn Peninsula’s clifftop promontory to the South Wales’ limestone sea cliffs of the Gower and Pembroke provides a portrait landscape of Celtic Atlantic highland and coastal character of considerable and varied grandeur. For Wales wedding photography, the concentrated variety of mountain, coast and castle landscape accessible within a small geographic area — Snowdon’s 1,085-metre summit is closer to the coast at Barmouth than Cambridge is to London — provides portrait environments of exceptional diversity.
Snowdonia, the Brecon Beacons and the Welsh Mountain Landscape
Snowdonia National Park — the Welsh mountain massif of Gwynedd centred on Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon) at 1,085 metres, with the Pyg Track’s scree-and-rock ascent, the Glaslyn lake tarn reflected below the summit cliffs and the Snowdon Horseshoe’s ridge walk above the Llanberis Pass — provides Wales’ most dramatic and most universally recognised mountain portrait landscape. The Brecon Beacons’ sandstone plateau at Pen y Fan (886 metres) — the highest summit in southern Britain, with the characteristic flat-topped Beacons’ north face above the Neuadd Reservoirs and the Talybont valley — provides South Wales’ primary mountain portrait destination. The Cadair Idris massif’s cwm of Llyn Cau provides a further mountain tarn portrait setting.
Pembrokeshire Coast, the Gower and the Welsh Atlantic Shore
The Pembrokeshire Coast National Park — the only UK national park designated primarily for its coastline, with the 186-mile Coast Path above the Preseli Hills’ volcanic blue-dolerite outcrops (the Stonehenge bluestones’ source), St Davids Cathedral’s hidden valley setting and the Marloes Peninsula’s red-sandstone sea stacks — provides the most dramatically varied coastal portrait landscape in Wales. The Gower’s Three Cliffs Bay and Rhossili’s nine-mile horseshoe bay provide Wales’ most celebrated coastal portrait settings described in the Swansea page. Wales’ Norman and Welsh castles — Caernarfon’s UNESCO World Heritage concentric castle, Harlech above the Tremadog Bay, Conwy and Beaumaris — provide castle portrait settings of extraordinary Welsh medieval history.