When two seasoned wedding photographers get married: A moody fairy-tale wedding taking place at two of Vancouver’s iconic venues, filled with personalized design elements, unique events and all about the guest experience
We are both wedding photographers & artists ourselves, having captured weddings for over 12 years, we opted to have not only one but two weddings.
We celebrated our first wedding with a month-long self-portrait pre-wedding project, where we travelled around Europe for a month with a tripod, took our own engagement photos in the most picturesque locations and ended our trip with an intimate, romantic, fairytale & symbolic destination wedding with 38 guests at a French castle near Paris.
For our second, larger-scale wedding, we wanted a BIG experience for ourselves and our guests while still incorporating the fairytale theme.
As a watercolour illustrator, photographer and bride, throughout 2 years of planning my larger-scale wedding, I designed the wedding invitations, signage, and other stationery, hand-painted the guest name cards and even drew the dance floor monogram. It was important to us that our wedding had many DIY elements; we wanted to stay add our own unique and artistic DNA to our wedding, making it a meaningful and heartfelt day.
Being the stylist and bridal fashion guru at our pre-wedding studio, attire was very important to me. I wanted to stand out from the usual wedding and adorned myself in 12 different bridal outfits throughout the day, with my wedding gown being a statement piece: a black mermaid wedding gown.
My groom, being the passionate photographer that he is, wanted to continue our self-portrait pre-wedding project. On the day of the wedding, he put on his wedding photographer’s hat and captured some of the wedding day moments through his own lens and perspective. I love looking back at the photos my husband Jun personally took.
We wanted our guests to have a BIG experience, we assembled customized bridal party gift boxes, wedding favours, had a school bus for transportation, handpicked specialty “His and Her” cocktails and prepared a self-serve ice-cream & instant noodles station late at night. We also surprised our guests by having my groom skateboard the aisle during his Processional and we further surprised them with a 10 minute choreographed dance from our friend Hannah Ip which of course included multiple attire changes too! We wanted our guests to leave with a memorable experience.
Our vision would not have been properly executed if it was not for the help of our industry colleagues and friends. Shing Weddings was our planner and they took care of us for nearly 2 years and made the entire wedding day smooth, stress-free. Evan from Koncept Events and Flower-z created the stunning floral and décor. He custom-made our moon backdrop and helped make my watercolour designs a reality! Our venues HY Tea Lounge and the Vancouver Club were the perfect venues and hosts.
We are so thrilled that we were able to stay true to ourselves, having a unique and artistic DNA wedding that focused on style, design, entertainment and guest experience.
