Smogshoppe wedding; Covid Pandemic marriage First, then BIG Celebrations! - Stacey & Greg

Stacey and Greg got married during COVID pandemic at Honda Civic Center's Parking lot, and then threw a 3-day #wedding celebrations with their loved ones at #TheCulverHotel and #Smoggshope in Los Angeles. We're a team of #weddingphotojournalists and wedding documentary filmmakers, based in Los Angeles and San Diego, California. We're also experienced destination wedding photographers and #weddingvideographers

In the midst of COVID pandemic lockdown, Stacey and Greg couldn’t wait to get married.

So they did it one witness (their friend) in the parking lot of Honda Civic Center. The above 10-minute-long wedding film tells a great story about their love, the spontaneous civil ceremony with their masks on, and then finally 3-day-long wedding celebrations with their loved ones 2 years later in Los Angeles, California - at The Culver Hotel in Culver City, and at Smogshoppe in Los Angeles.

I hope you’ve sat through the entire film and felt all the emotions.

Stacey and Greg are the sweetest couple I’ve ever met and people who I’d personally love to keep in my life. Their gesture and appreciation towards “small things” in life is very admirable; “nothing is too small to celebrate,” they say.

As a couple they value supporting each other’s dreams, growth, and joy. They love being with and hosting friends, and they travel to new places, and their favorite activities are eating, strolling through residential neighborhoods, and visiting cemeteries.

“We like to think we’re pretty laid-back, but we also are chronic over-committers. There are too many things we want to do and too little time!” Stacy says. And I, too, am feeling the same way about life in general.

Stacey has two sisters. Her dad is originally from China and her mom was a refugee from Myanmar and moved to San Francisco as a young adult with her parents and 8 other siblings. Chinese was not her first language but she was ethicially Chinese so could communicate with her dad in Chinese. Her mom died pretty suddenly from cancer when Stacey was 10 years old. And our filmmaker Ailin made a little teaser of the wedding film where you could feel her presence everywhere.

The celebration highlight was at the end - a wedding tradition from Greg’s family side, which family members “surprise” or mess with the newlyweds by “decorating” their car on the wedding day. They secretly decided to fill up their Honda CRV with colorful balloons and cover the entire car including windows with colorful post-its. Then they threw some confettis and baby dolls inside of the car. I almost missed this because I had already left the venue as everybody left, but guess what? I had to go back to the venue because I forgot my camera batteries and charger, and so luckily we got to witness their struggles with peeling off all the post-its and clearing space inside of the car. It was purely amazing that I got to capture their family wedding tradition. That was seriously the best ending to their night. xoxo

Tribute to mother. Remembering and feeling her presence on the wedding day.