Pretty Place Chapel Elopement Photography

Pretty Place Chapel, also known as the Fred W. Symmes Chapel, is one of the most beautiful chapels I’ve ever been in. It sits on a cliff with long-range, sweeping mountain views in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It is owned by the YMCA Camp Greenville. It sits at roughly 3,200 feet in elevation in Cleveland, South Carolina; however, it is very close to North Carolina and some of the most iconic waterfalls in the Southeast and the Blue Ridge Mountains.

If you’re planning a wedding here, you will need to be aware that there are very specific booking protocols. With opening dates to book your date each year requiring strict planning and coordination with the YMCA, we can help guide you through all of this and you can find detailed information about booking here.

The views are simply amazing. I don’t think I can express that enough. As a photographer, I don’t know of a more beautiful chapel with long-range mountain views in the world. The closest thing I can think of is the Chapel of the Transfiguration in Grand Tetons National Park near Moose Junction, but that chapel is not open-air.

If you are considering an elopement at Pretty Place Chapel, I think it is honestly the best way to experience this venue from a photography standpoint.

With a full wedding, you are managing 300+ guests, a tight two-hour window, and a shot list that has to move fast. With an elopement, all of that pressure disappears. It is just you, your partner, maybe a handful of your closest people, and one of the most incredible backdrops in the Southeast.

The weekday pricing is a big advantage here. Monday through Thursday, the two-hour block is $2,500 compared to $3,200 on weekends. And with fewer people to coordinate, the timeline works in your favor. You have more flexibility to chase the best light, to wait out a fog bank, or to take your time with portraits instead of rushing through them.

The vibe of a 10-person elopement in an open-air chapel on a mountainside is completely different from a 300-person wedding. It is quieter. It is more intimate. And photographically, it gives us so much more room to work. We can move around the chapel, find angles that would be impossible with rows of guests, and really let the venue do what it does best.

The elopement timeline also pairs perfectly with the DuPont adventure session. A sunrise ceremony at Pretty Place followed by a waterfall session at DuPont is, in my opinion, one of the most unique and photogenic experiences you can have anywhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Nobody else is really offering this combination, and the variety of images you walk away with is unlike anything a single venue can provide.

So you have two options here, and the first thing to know is that you can propose at Pretty Place Chapel without paying any type of fee. The chapel is open to the public during daylight hours when it is not reserved for a private event. If you want the place locked down just for you, you can pay the reservation fee and the YMCA will close it off for a private experience.

Option 1: Book the facility. If the date is available, you can reserve it and have a private, stunning proposal all to yourself. No strangers, no interruptions.

Option 2: Use the public access hours. Just make sure the YMCA has that date open on their visitation schedule and show up. Depending on the time of day, the time of year, and the day of the week, you may have the place completely to yourself or it may be packed. There is no real way to tell.

How We Handle Proposal Photography

Cell phone service in the area can be spotty for the last stretch of the drive. What we do is if you have an iPhone, we share locations with each other using Find My so you can track my location in real time and I can track your location in real time. That gives you a piece of comfort knowing that I am already there and in place and you can see it on your iPhone without text messaging or anything else. It also allows me to track you and know if you are running 20 minutes behind so we are not sitting there panicking.

We also wear something that is very easy to spot so when you walk in, you will know where we are. We will be hiding our cameras as to not give it away. We also ask that you send us a photo the morning of if you can get one of both of you, that is ideal. That way we will know what you are wearing and what to look for. If not, we can just take one of you so we know what you are wearing and you are easy to spot.

Positioning is very important for proposal photography as we want to be able to see both of your faces. If one of your backs is to us, it kind of changes the whole feel of the photos. We will go over positioning in detail with you.

Sunrise offers amazing, cinematic, dramatic, epic mountain long-range views with god ray potential photos you could ever ask for. It also comes with some risk that we cover in the lighting guide below. The advantage of doing a proposal is we can take an educated guess the day before, if you are flexible, and pick our timing a little bit better based on what the weather says. This extra added flexibility that weddings and elopements at Pretty Place Chapel don’t necessarily have allows us to get the best possible photos.

Since Pretty Place does not allow receptions on the grounds, you are going to need a plan for after the ceremony. Where you hold your reception really depends on the size of your wedding and where your guests are staying.

If ease of access to Pretty Place is your top priority, we highly recommend staying in the Brevard area. Brevard is only about 18 miles away and around 32 minutes of drive time, which is a huge advantage if you are doing an early morning ceremony.

For elopements and micro weddings, the DuPont Yurts are an incredible option. They are ridiculously close to the forest, and honestly, those yurts are nicer than many houses I have been in. You can basically walk to Lake Imaging or Triple Falls from there. It is an amazing home base for a weekend elopement experience.

If you want to do something a little adventurous and you like horses, Shoal Creek is nearby and offers trail rides that allow you to access waterfalls in DuPont that are a little trickier to get to, like Wintergreen Falls. That is a genuinely unique experience you are not going to find many places.

If your wedding is on the larger side for Pretty Place Chapel, I highly recommend having your reception in Asheville. You will have more choices with a wider range of vendors. Asheville is really geared towards the wedding industry more than Brevard, Hendersonville, or Greenville. The drive from Pretty Place to Asheville is about an hour and 10 minutes, which is very doable with a cocktail hour planned at the reception venue to give everyone time to arrive.