Tamborine Mountain Wedding Photography
A rainforest plateau above the Gold Coast, five degrees cooler and sometimes inside the cloud
Tamborine Mountain is a plateau at 525 metres in the Gold Coast hinterland, about 72 km south-east of Brisbane and 37 km inland from the coast, with the villages of North Tamborine, Eagle Heights and Mount Tamborine spread along the top. Witches Falls, declared in 1908, was Queensland’s first national park, and Tamborine National Park still runs through the plateau. Venues range from rainforest lodges on Cedar Creek to estates on the escarpment edge that look over the Gold Coast to the sea.
We have photographed a wedding at Albert River Wines and filmed one at Tamborine Mountain Glades, where the ceremony amphitheatre sits under the canopy beside Cedar Creek. The mountain runs five to seven degrees cooler than the lowlands, which matters for a summer wedding, and it gets around 1,550 mm of rain a year, most of it between December and March.
Photographing weddings on Tamborine Mountain
The eastern escarpment gets sunrise over the Gold Coast beaches and the western side gets sunset behind the ranges, so the venue’s aspect decides the timeline. Under the rainforest canopy the light is flat and green at any hour, which is a gift for a midday ceremony and asks for a little flash on the dancefloor. Cloud rolls across the plateau without warning, so we shoot every version of the view. Covered amphitheatres and verandahs handle the wet, and the Gold Coast is 45 minutes down the hill.